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In organizations today, storage needs have doubled or tripled annually for the past few years. And with much of that storage directly attached to tens or hundreds of individual distributed servers, configuration, backup and other management tasks have become more expensive, time consuming, and staff intensive. That's the reason, network storage in organizations is passing through transition phase and new technologies are evolving .

Almost all vendors are working to simplify choices and lower the entry price of storage networks for small and midsized companies. Such customers have application requirements that warrant a storage area network, but not the budget or raw capacity demands to justify it with current solution.

TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Storage virtualization: As a concept, has existed for a long time, however, was probably never called so. Storage pooling, data migration, and replication are all virtualization technologies. Storage virtualization is commonly used in a storage area network (SAN). The management of storage devices can be tedious and time-consuming. Storage virtualization helps the storage administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily, and in less time, by disguising the actual complexity of the SAN. Virtualizations are essentially of three types-host based, switch based, and disk based.

There's still a little hype about virtualization, but the five key elements will become a part of any comprehensive enterprise storage network. These five key elements consist of storage resource management, storage network management, policy management, data management, and virtualization.

	EXPERTS PANEL
	Manoj Chugh, president, (India & SAARC), EMC Praveen Sahai, marketing manager, Data Management Group, Sun Microsystems India Sanjay Kharade, principal consultant (India & SAARC), Cisco Systems

There are also some key challenges of storage virtualization which need to be addressed to avail the benefits. In terms of scale, since, virtualization technology aggregates multiple devices it must scale in performance to support the combined environment. In terms of functionality, it masks existing storage functionality, therefore it must provide required functions, or enable existing functions. In terms of management, it introduces a new layer of management so it must be integrated with existing storage-management tools. Lastly, in terms of support, it adds new complexity into the storage network hence; it requires vendors to perform additional interoperability tests.

Also, the policies should be driven by the management systems that are present in the environment. Virtualization shouldn't necessarily have its own set of policies.  It should be driven by overall management systems.              

Companies that have large, diverse and complex environments. They are looking to simplify the management of these environments and are good candidates for implementing virtualization.  Some of the verticals where we have seen early interest have been in the telecom, financial services and retail industries.  But it's certainly not confined to these verticals.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM): It is also coming up more as “a market direction for storage”. It is a direction that the entire storage industry shall move in, much as the case has been with networked storage over last two years. Implementing ILM means a lot of effort in identifying and categorizing business data, which is often a specialist's job. Storage vendors therefore are eyeing revenues through consultation services for implementing ILM. The industry is witnessing a shift towards shared storage, virtualization and storage resource management.

IPSAN: The introduction of IP to the storage networking industry is transforming it from a closed and proprietary world to one that is open, based on industry standards with a strong pace of technology innovation.

SAN was considered to be expensive and complicated as a technology. However, with the coming of IPSAN, this area of concern of enterprises has been put to rest. The industry is positively looking at IPSAN as a solution and we are expecting to see an increase in adoption the next one year of so. The ability to deliver SAN at a fraction of the cost and complexity of fiber channel SANs and its superior performance and scalability over NAS is driving the growth IPSAN.

The network storage business is expected to grow at 50%. This optimism is shared by IDC too which predicts that IPSAN is expected garner more than 25% of the global storage market by 2007.

Larger enterprises and vertical markets like financial institutions, service providers and ITeS that have a huge amount of data requirements will be the key adopters of IPSAN.

The top few upcoming trends in IPSAN would include large chunk of FC SAN would move to IPSAN, major OSM would come out with IP Storage System and low cost FC to IP Bridge would be available.

Content Addressed Storage (CAS): When businesses have looked for fixed content (representing more than 50% of the newly created data) storage solutions they've faced a dilemma: as there was a complete mismatch in what they need versus what the storage industry offers while at the same time maintaining the cost effectiveness CAS not only assures content integrity for long-term storage, but also guarantees that all data will remain unchanged over time. Through its self-configuration, self-healing and self-managed operations capabilities, CAS can eliminate the need for additional resources to perform data management and data-protection activities, and dramatically lower the total cost structure for fixed content. Its plug-and-play scalability automatically recognizes additional capacity as it is added, and its online capability makes it possible to retrieve data from anywhere on the network-anytime.

Growth in mobile applications: Mobile phones in India have become more than a voice device for the users. The mobile phone is gradually becoming the key communication device for both data and voice services. Increasing users are using the mobile for entertainment, gaming and music applications giving rise to a huge amount of data, which needs to be managed at the service providers end.  

CHALLENGES
As data availability becomes a key differentiator for enterprises, an increasing amount of resources are being spent in ensuring continuous operations. Dedicated networks are being provisioned to guarantee performance metrics as well as security for backup applications. However some concerns still exist with CIO's which revolve around and that include performance of the application, management of various data centers, complexity of design and deployment, cost of the solution, availability, and security.

SOLUTION
Storage is increasingly being seen as a strategic investment. Customers have realized that information storage and management is a specialized function and they need to separate their storage buying decisions from server buying decisions.

While making purchase of network storage solutions, customers would look at improved utilization of assets through tiered storage, delivery of varying service levels while reducing costs and simplified and automated management of information and storage infrastructure. They would also look to tap more effective options for access, business continuity, and protection. It would be imperative to ensure regulatory and corporate governance compliance through policy-based management.

Enterprises are looking for storage that is not only secure, but also has high availability, besides being cost effective. Organizations are seeking to move away from application dependency to data independence. In order for this to happen, storage must become either application-transparent or accessible by any application according to hierarchical requirements. To help achieve this, two basic areas must be added into the network storage presentation. They are virtualization and data mobility.

ISCSI VS FIBRE CHANNEL
IP based storage has attained increased prominence at the enterprise level because of the cost factor; it helps in total network storage consolidation of storage resources at a lower cost and centralizes the storage architecture. It also helps in leveraging existing investments in fibre channel SAN. In case of NAS it extends NAS consolidation capabilities to include traditional block applications.

It is not viable to invest in a traditional fiber channel network for all the servers because of cost prohibitions while IPSAN is cost effective. IPSAN helps centralize the storage infrastructure and provides total consolidation to the storage infrastructure by connecting stranded servers. Traditional SAN is limited by distance but IPSAN can help overcome that limitation by connecting geographically distributed servers/networks. However, traditional fiber channel SAN is more robust and secure and has more features compared to IPSAN. Therefore, traditional fiber channel based SANs can't be replaced for managing mission-critical information while IPSAN could be used for tier II information management.

iSCSI is not a competitive technology to traditional fiber channel SAN but a complimentary technology. IPSAN is a perfect solution for low-mid tier organizations that are planning to move to networked storage or could help in consolidating existing SANs at high end. 

Thus, managing the growing volumes of information in the light of compliance pressures will usher in more intelligent management applications that will include search and information policies. The solutions would help customers align information with their business goals, offers information technology that will transform the impact of IT on your business. Open standards and partnerships will both be fundamental to bring the whole industry forward.

iSCSI emerged more recently, not only giving IT managers an inexpensive way to connect their servers to their SANs but also giving them a way to extend their SANs across WANs.

iSCSI enables affordable storage consolidation solutions particularly in environments populated with low-cost storage servers where simplicity, flexibility, and price/performance are critical IT decision-making factors. iSCSI also enables truly affordable disaster recovery, data backup, and secondary storage solutions.  

There are a number of benefits iSCSI has to offer as a storage area networking technology. SAN technologies greatly increase the user's ability to utilize more storage resources as opposed to having storage on a single system that cannot be accessed by other systems or remote users. iSCSI enables a large installed base of block level direct attached storage devices to be accessed by multiple systems over an existing Ethernet network.

Although there are still issues to be resolved-particularly standards-fiber channel offers users a world of new storage opportunities. Fiber channel allows a many-to-many connection or many-to-one connection instead of a one-to-one connection, enabling users to share drives.

Perhaps the greatest advantages of fiber channel lie in the areas of speed and distance. The technology can deliver high-speed, high-capacity throughput of up to 100 megabytes per second-more than double the speed of traditional SCSI- and it enables users to physically separate servers from storage by up to 10 kms-more than 300 times the distance of iSCSI.

Some companies require a storage network that can address database application requirements for direct access to block-level storage capacity. Fiber channel storage area networks satisfy this need, but due to high cost and complexity, companies either delay the investment or deploy a SAN with a limited number of connections. To address the need for a simple, low cost SAN, new technologies such as iSCSI now provide an affordable solution. In detailing the value of iSCSI (IP-SANs).

NAS-SAN CONVERGENCE
The convergence of NAS and SAN is expected to accelerate this year, as it would allow enterprises to consolidate their storage solutions and have better return on investments (RoI). Though NAS as a solution has been loosing ground given other most cost effective solutions for the enterprise market, but most of the industry leaders opine that both NAS-SAN will co-exist.

EMC, the market leader in both SAN and NAS does offer products that enable NAS-SAN convergence.

The technology that is revolutionizing NAS is what EMC refers to as NAS Gateways. These are essentially NAS headers that allow NAS functionality on a SAN and Gateways are the fastest growing segment of the NAS market. 

Both NAS and SAN are growing at a tremendous rate around the world. If we look globally, both are neck to neck, and with the recent adoption of iSCSI, the lines between NAS and SAN are blurring.

The adoption of these technologies is more dependent on the business requirements, cost and value acquired through the technology. Typically, SAN is being implemented where there is a mission critical ERP system running while a NAS is typically deployed by R&D arms or software development centers. However, NAS does have a cost advantage and has a higher adoption rate among SMEs who would place more emphasis on file sharing and are not using high performance applications.

Technically, NAS stores and accesses data at the file level, while SANs store and access data at the block level. NAS is also a better fit for the smaller enterprises that do not depend on a local network administrator. This technology is under intense scrutiny and evaluation in the resource sector (mining, agriculture, construction etc.), education, and auto/aerospace manufacturing. The stringent budget and IT staffing constraints in the first two segments play heavily in shaping the preference for NAS.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in