Cloud And Technology, The Savior For Data Solutions

Storage solutions, as a space in the IT industry has always generated enough
interest in the manufacturing as well as in the trading space. However, this
area of interest, seems to have stifled for quite a long time now, with fewer
technological break-through after the shift of focus from storage devices to
storage area network (SAN).

SAN is an architecture, which shares remote data across platforms (storage
devices) to servers and makes it appear locally attached by the operating
system.

The SAN, under normal conditions is not accessible through the regular
devices, which historically led to its decline in the later part of CY 2000.

The market overview

After the emergence of the concept of cloud computing and the rise of ERP,
the IT industry, both on the hardware as well as the intra-software front seems
to be on the converging mode with nearly every possible application life-cycles
brought under the realm of the cloud. Soon, the concept of the network storage
from the data silos evolved, which led to the rapid spread of storage devices as
well as software technological improvements on this front. Since then, not much
has been heard of storage solutions, although this space remains a lucrative
option.

"There has been an increased interest among the large enterprises as well as
among the SMBs to invest in storage technologies for better RoI and increased
TCO. As an interesting development, SMBs are keen to move from a direct attached
storage (DAS) model to a networked attached storage (NAS). On vendor side,
majority of the storage heavy weights such as EMC, IBM, HP and Hitachi have been
experiencing a significant growth in their storage revenues from the India
market," said Manish Bahl, Director-Research Operations, Springboard Research
India.

Over the period of time, it has been noticed that the enterprise segment is
keen to invest in technologies such as storage virtualization, data
deduplication and backup solutions, a trend quite similar at the APAC level.

The segments

"Banking and finance sector continues to be the potential market for storage
virtualization. There have been a number of storage virtual deployments in the
recent past by leading banks such as State Bank of India, Canara Bank and HDFC
Bank etc. In tier-2 and 3 cities, banks have also made a considerable investment
in virtual storage infrastructure," said Rajesh Anbalagan, Research Analyst,
Springboard Research India. Besides banking and finance, Anbalagan also opined
that the telecom operators will continue investing in storage virtualization
with the prime focus move from capex to opex model.

There has been a radical change in the way enterprises look at storage
related IT spending today. They have started to look at storage as a key
component of their overall IT infrastructure and new storage technologies are in
the wish list of a several CIOs to reduce their operational cost, while
achieving better utilization rates.

"Storage virtualization-related investments have gained momentum among large
and medium-sized enterprises. The technology has witnessed number of
deployments, including Maruti Suzuki, Nagarjuna Chemicals and Mudra
Communications. Besides this, there has been an increasing trend towards
datacenters and data recovery site and archiving to streamline storage
infrastructure by enterprises," Anbalagan concluded.

The technology

Storage technologies can be broadly classified as Storage Area Networks
(SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). SAN
and NAS technologies provide storage space over a network, whereas DAS refers to
storage directly attached to a computer (without a network between them).

Most organizations opt for a SAN environment over NAS for managing their
generic storage requirements as SAN provides access to block level storage, as
opposed to file level storage offered by a NAS. NAS is preferred if the
organization requires a dedicated file server.

"For the Indian market, the greatest interest in storage solutions has come
from IT service vendors and the financial sector. There has been a growing
interest in the market around recent SAN technologies such as FCoE, which
extends the fiber channel to Ethernet networks, and iSCSI, which enables storage
to be handled through IP networks. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and
cons of adopting either of these technologies as they have their own sweet spots
of applicability," commented Chandranshu Singh, Infrastructure and Integration
Technology Analyst, Ovum India.

Network storage and virtualization have been the key drivers for the demand
in this segment. Virtualization removes the incumbencies in storage and
optimizes the data sharing scenario. It also helps in securing optimal RoI and
reduces the operational costs by managing data across engines. With load
balancer and shared data across workstations, virtualization helps in efficient
data sharing.

"Hitachi has introduced a dual controller load balancer in the concept of
data virtualization, which helps in managing the load balancers and helps them
perform better with equal efficiency. We have been concentrating on the
government, BFSI, manufacturing and telecom space for the storage solutions,"
said Srikant Chakrapani, Director-Channels and Alliances, Hitachi Data Systems
India.

The opportunity

Virtualization, cloud services and SaaS are the hot and emerging areas where
virtualization is a prerequisite for cloud services. Microsoft is investing
heavily on Hyper-V virtualization software and also Azure Windows Platform for
cloud services. Major areas of focus in cloud have been on infrastructure,
platform and applications support.

"ISVs like Microsoft and IBM are investing on cloud offering with an
end-to-end strategy to integrate existing applications (including migration
services) with new platform and infrastructure layer. All existing storage
solutions need to be object store aware and applications need to be migrated to
fit into the new paradigm," said Kishor Wikhe, Senior VP, Enterprise Technology,
Symphony Services.

"There is a tremendous potential in this area due to the buzz around cloud.
This is a fairly consolidated market with the early adopters gaining a strong
market share with other ISV's struggling to stay in the race. Virtualization is
the first step towards moving to the cloud environment, hence as the cloud
pattern grows, storage virtualization will also follow the suit. Also, as
organizations take steps towards going green, technologies such as storage
virtualization will become more important," Wikhe said.

The lag factor

According to Ovum, the adoption in storage virtualization has been slow. The
key factors hindering the adoption are the enormous initial deployment costs and
deciding on different kinds of virtualization technologies such as server and
storage virtualization to work with each other. On the second place, data
protection and recovery becomes quite complex as well as expensive in
virtualized environments. Besides, one of the hindrances include the factor of
'vendor lock in' as there is a little interoperability among solutions from
different vendors.

Today, storage solutions are no longer concentrated on just implementing or
deploying a storage device. This is the age of convergence and nowadays, the
customers being more educated and conscious are demanding a holistic and
converged solution with focus on cost reduction.

"The current size of the data universe is estimated to be 1.2 million
petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes. As per certain IDC reports, despite an economic
slowdown or meltdown in some quarters, the total amount of data still grew by 62
percent. The growth was largely driven by all major forms of media, including
voice, TV, radio, print, apart from the regular growth that comes from
commercial applications," Wikhe opined.

Although organizations, both in the enterprise as well as in the SMB segment
continues to invest in the storage space, third party or outsourced datacenters
are catching up the tempo. As such, the scenario in the data solutions space
does not look as impressive as it was during the early 2004.

"We do foresee a rise in demand, but not considerable enough. We would call
the demand 'considerable' if more and more enterprises opt for new datacenters
to address their growing computing and storage requirements. The availability of
cheap power would be a significant factor. If this continues; there will be a
significant spike in demand over the next couple of years," Chandranshu Singh
opined.

"E-mail client deployment, ERP solutions and archiving is playing the lead
role in terms of deployment. These days the government is opting for
surveillance products, which pushes up the demand for storage solutions and our
channel partners can focus on this avenue for growth," Chakrapani concluded.

Closing remarks

As the debate over the future of the data solutions continues to echo around
the business corner, the existing opportunity in this perspective to an extent
continues to hang around the future of cloud computing in India and the
technological advancements it can bring in with it.

Avishek Rakshit

avishekr@cybermedia.co.in