Organizations in India have traditionally tended to invest in direct attached storage (DAS). Today, Indian enterprises are increasingly shifting from DAS to automated network storage (ANS). Hence, organizations are moving away from a stovepiped architecture to creating a robust ANS infrastructure that is server-independent.

Industry analysts forecast that by 2005, nearly 70 percent of all information storage will be networked. It is ANS that allows organizations to reduce the total cost of ownership through consolidation, control, capacity utilization and centralized management. Doing away with information silos not only lowers management complexity, but it also makes information more accessible across the enterprise. The three dominant trends for the storage market that will drive both the available technology options as well as influence strategic buying decisions are

• Storage consolidation and networked storage
• Increasing demand for tools to manage information
• The rising complexity of IT, meeting service levels and ensuring business continuity

Technology Trends
l NAS-SAN Convergence: The NAS-SAN debate is gradually subsiding as both Indian enterprises and storage vendors recognize the overall advantages of a networked storage model where NAS and SAN complement each other. NAS provides high-speed file services to networked clients, while SAN provides high-speed storage services to servers at the block level on a neutral server platform. The fusion of NAS and SAN is an emerging trend in Indian enterprises. The back end, which is an array of disks, remains the same, and it can be used by both the technologies. The front-end can be NAS or SAN. Hence, there is no need to replicate the disk array twice as the array can be common for both NAS and SAN. This means cost savings and easier management. The convergence of NAS and SAN would lead to better storage solutions for enterprise customers. The fusion would remove misconceptions about these technologies from the users’ minds. Together, they cater to possibly all kinds of performance requirements an enterprise may have.

l Storage Consolidation: Today, there are islands of information in organizations and managing them is a major problem. Networked storage can consolidate not only the storage infrastructure, but also the entire IT infrastructure. With industry analysts forecasting that by 2005 nearly 70 percent of all information storage will be networked, consolidation is set to become the buzzword in storage parlance. Organizations are going for centralized automated backup and storage consolidation. It can help in remote management, not changing media so often, lesser data loss concerns and low total cost of ownership (TCO). Storage consolidation is a logical fallout of NAS and SAN convergence. While SAN shares storage resources through a common network, NAS shares files through an IP network. By uniting the two, files can be accessed through NAS and delivered through SAN thus providing a new topology—consolidation or shared storage.

l Storage Virtualization: One of the most important trends in the storage space is that customers will see more and more of their storage assets being virtualized. This trend towards virtualization will result in an overall lower cost of managed storage for the customers. There will be a gradual blurring of the lines between storage virtualization and server virtualization. Multiple OSs will run simultaneously and independently on the same Intel-based server or workstation. These ‘virtual machines’ integrate seamlessly into existing physical infrastructures and management frameworks, allowing users to see resources as if they were dedicated to them, while CIOs manage and optimize those resources globally across the enterprise.

Over time, virtualization will not be seen as a specific product; it will be seen as a set of underlying storage capabilities: layered functionality at each level that helps management tools do a better job of managing. Operating system management (OSM) will combine underlying functionality with lower-level abstractions that simplify the management of complex storage environments. An OSM infrastructure will be able to harness functionality at each level and make the user-visible storage management tools even more powerful.

l Enterprise Storage Automation: Storage management is managing storage assets with an eye towards maximizing application availability, service levels, speed, and flexibility. Storage management practices encompass the policies, user activities, system processes, and workflow by which one delivers information management services across the storage network. Automation improves the quality, consistency, and responsiveness of storage infrastructure.

Enterprises are leveraging storage management tools in order to reduce costs through enhanced operational efficiency. A single view of all information resources fosters revenue creation and inspires operational efficiency, in turn driving the business forward. Significant efficiencies are gained through greater integration of hardware and software. For many Indian enterprises, capacity utilization is typically poor, leaving a large percentage of storage resources unutilized. If effectively used, storage management tools can help keep track of capacity utilization and enable organizations to take relevant decisions on future acquisitions of storage requirements.

Industry standards usually help enterprises mix and match best-of-breed storage management systems. Accordingly, organizations like the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) have come up with some standards like Storage Management Interface Specifications. Though adequate standards to ensure interoperability and management of heterogeneous software and hardware devices are yet to be developed, significant initiatives have been taken through the common information model (CIM) and Bluefin initiatives. CIM is an object-oriented information model, which provides a conceptual framework for describing the management data.

l iSCSI Standard: Suitable interconnects like the iSCSI, which ensure smooth data accessibility and availability are gaining momentum. The iSCSI specification has been frozen this year and all vendors have been developing products around this technology. iSCSI is still in the nascent stage of the introduction cycle. Many users do not yet know whether it will be appropriate for their organizations. This cycle is likely to continue for another 18 months to two years before adoption becomes widespread. Enterprises will use iSCSI to consolidate backup from remote sites and servers.

iSCSI SANs are most suitable for organizations with a need for streamlining large amounts of data to store and transmit over the network such as ISPs, organizations geographically distributed, and organizations that need remote data replication and disaster recovery. There are a number of advantages of using iSCSI for SAN. One is that fiber channel uses a host bus adapter (for network interfacing), which is four times as costly as a network interface card. iSCSI uses IP technology that is easily understood and widely deployed. Using iSCSI, enterprises can do both file and block access over IP, that was not possible earlier. Enterprise customers need not invest separately for file and block access any longer. The other advantage of using IP is that enterprises can connect at speeds up to 10 Gbps. Fiber channels cannot be used over long distances and are limited to10 km.

l Information-lifecycle Management: Many enterprises want greater ability to ‘virtualize’ storage devices and systems. They want to treat their storage as a single pool of resources that can be allocated and reallocated as needed. They also want better tools to automate the management of data from creation to deletion or long-term storage. This has given rise to the concept of information-life-cycle management (ILM). ILM—the notion that data should be stored accordingly as its value changes over time—is the next phase of storage evolution. It begins with tactical ILM—tiered, targeted implementations at ‘pain points’ such as e-mail and large databases.

Information made available to the business, when the business needs it, helps meet new archiving requirements, mitigate risks, realize operational cost savings, improves data and application availability, and increases business agility. Currently, these are issues faced by CIOs. The ILM strategy helps the user to contain and reduce costs through the use of services, improved and increased utilization of storage, reduced storage complexity and by leveraging and protecting past hardware investments. ILM can help increase application availability, reduce downtime and improve performance by dynamically managing data throughout its lifecycle while simultaneously placing data in virtualized storage pools to meet business and legal requirements.

l Asynchronous Replication: Another upcoming trend is asynchronous replication, which dramatically reduces bandwidth requirements. Instead of replicating the entire track, the technology enables the replication of data at the sector level. As a result, if there is a change only in a particular sector, only that will be replicated to the remote site instead of the whole track. Copying at the smallest possible unit helps not only in reduced bandwidth requirements, but also improves manageability.

l Content Addressed Storage (CAS): The biggest need in the world of storage today, is of technology and products to deal with ‘fixed storage’. According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, the world produces between 1–2 billion GB of unique information annually, with three-quarters of that being archival storage—content in its final form that should not be altered. Dealing with this deluge of data, and extracting, protecting, and storing the information contained within, is something that every CIO is learning today. That is because archiving is only part of the problem. Archived data is not just stored and ignored. Hospitals need to access their archived patient records, banks access archived check records, and archived Internet content could be subject to millions of accesses per day. Access, of course, provides opportunities for hackers, and that makes archival storage, which has potential to be one of the largest niche markets, a security nightmare.

This rapid accumulation of fixed content demands a new category of storage designed for the secure, online storage and retrieval of such information for years and years—content addressed storage (CAS). Rather than access a data object by its file name at a physical location, a CAS device uses a content address to store and retrieve the object. Because content often accumulates without any upper limit, a CAS repository must be extremely easy to scale to even a Petabyte (1,024 terabytes), while maintaining a sub-second access performance.

l Fabric-attached Storage (FAS): The cost considerations related to various storage architectures has led to FAS, a more economical and efficient storage architecture. FAS is a combination of SAN and NAS that can be utilized by plugging in a card into the server. The server then communicates the storage through the fiber into the repository. The biggest benefit of FAS is that it uses open protocols and is platform independent. This allows easy interoperability. In the current market conditions where most high-end SAN solutions are proprietary, FAS has a good chance of emerging as a popular choice among Indian enterprises.