Storage Solution : When Data Spells Survival

Data need is growing and its management is becoming crucial for
enterprises. As storage grabs the driver's seat in most emerging organizations,
vendors are keen to drive solutions pertaining to virtualization and
infrastructure management through solution providers

A systems integrator once joked that there is one similarity between data and
a girlfriend. Both can walk away anytime. Jokes apart, this is very true for the
former. If the data is not well protected then disaster can strike any time.

At the same time, the business world is working on dynamic deadlines.
Downtime has become a bad word and no company wants it as part of its network
lexicon.

Yet another interesting aspect is that with business expansion on the mind of
every other company, the quantity of data transmitted and stored is increasing.
As a consequence, managing it is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

The findings of EMC-IDC report on The Expanding Digital Universe, suggest
that informa­tion created or captured and replicated in digital form amoun­ted
to 161 Exabyte's in 2006 and is expected to touch 988 Exabyte's mark by 2010,
represen­ting a CAGR of 57 percent.

Put simply, it is equivalent to approximately three million times the
information in all the books ever written or the equivalent of 12 stacks of
books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun.
While you try to grasp the concept of such humungous amount of data just spare a
thought to its management and storage.

Storage solutions

Storage solutions can basically be divided into two categories. Primary
Storage includes disk solutions, server solutions, storage networking, migration
solutions and operating system solutions. Secondary Storage revolves around tape
solutions, compliance, back up and data archival solutions, designing policy and
integrating solutions.

Said Subram Natarajan, Senior Consultant, STG Asia Pacific, IBM, “Storage
solutions take into consideration the entire IT infrastructure along with the
application. Efficient manage­ment of storage infrastructure means ensuring that
both from a capacity management and performance management perspective, there
are sufficient monitoring tools that help collect relevant data from the storage
devices. It is based on these data that informed decisions can be taken.”

Manoj Suvarna, Country Head-Storage Works Division, HP India Sales stated,
“Storage solutions are a means of effect­ively managing the unstructured data to
provide business continuity to an organization.”

EMC provides provides storage solutions right from the point information are
created to the point when it is used up and becomes less relevant. In a nutshell
EMC's products and solutions range from archiving, backup and recovery, content
management, IT infrastructure management, security and virtualization among
others.

Quantum primarily focuses on backup, recovery and archival solutions when it
comes to storage. The company provides disc and tape backup products and
software. So while GoVault provides backup to disc and is an entry level
product, technologies like the patented Storage Care Guardian warns an IT
manager of a company about the problems they may face when it comes to storage
well in advance.

IBM has solutions for business of all size from a backup-restore archival
pers­pec­tive. It provides tape-based solutions that help customers realize the
best total cost of ownership. The company also provides tape drives, libraries
and virtualization solutions that can help backup/restore and archive data
reliably and effectively.

HP has recently launched solutions for the mid-sized companies considering
their limited budget. According to a survey done by HP, it came to a conclusion
that if companies don't have a backup they would run out of business. The
company has a product called EVA4400 that besides being affordable is also
simple to deploy and manage.

Role and scope for SPs

A customer's expectation in terms of capacity, performance, reliability and
cost is increasing and whatever solution providers offer as good today will have
to be better tomorrow in their pursuit to perfection.

Jim Simon, Director of Marketing-APAC, Quantum opined, “Solution providers
can play a significant role as they can offer value adds to customers. They are
close to the customers and in a position to recommend them the best in class
solutions. They can do problem evaluation and source the products and thus
should not merely restrict themselves to be order takers.”

Besides developing the requisite skill sets and having certified engineers on
board solution providers will have to create demand for the solutions. For this
they can emphasize on aspects like disaster recovery, thin provisioning (using
the disk to its fullest capacity) and storage management. They can also approach
the customers and ask them how they are managing their information and discuss
facts related to storage essentials, back up and importance of continuity in the
business. They will have to create awareness so that they (customers) are able
to identify their storage requirement.

During a recent partner advisory board HP identified that partners faced
problems when a lot of individual solutions had to be consolidated by them.
Talking about the same Li Qing Qiao, Product Marketing Manager and Strategist,
Storage Works Division-Asia Pacific, HP said, “The company recently has tested
the combination of different vendor solutions and displayed the same before
partners as well as customers suggesting ways in which complex storage solutions
can be made simpler and easy to deploy and manage.”

Again, not many solution providers deal with large-scale organizations. Their
major clients include SMB and SMEs who have limited budgets. Solution Providers
can thus recommend NAS solutions to their customers as they provides fast,
simple, reliable access to data in an IP networking environment.

To sum up, as Sonik Porwal, Director-Channels and Strategic Alliances, EMC
India and SAARC pointed out, “There is opportunity for the solution providers in
consolidation, backup, enterprise management, virtualization and information
security among other solutions.”

Growth trends

As the storage industry grows users keep finding ways of using the entire
storage. In terms of cost the recent trend that the storage industry has been
witnessing is that the newest hard drives in the market now are one terabyte and
cost around $300-400 whereas it used to cost around $100,000 in 2000. This also
suggests that the storage industry has been very aggressive in bringing down the
cost of storage. The current trend thus has been increasing capacity and
performance while decreasing cost.

In terms of technology, data de-duplication has entered the market and will
gradually pick up. Storage consolidation, virtualiza­tion and infrastructure
manage­ment will see major growth because it brings forth unique advantages of
realizing better asset utilization along with better availability and
flexibility. Financial institutions, telecom­muni­cation sector, manufac­turing
sector have all witnessed automation and are thus driving the storage business.
Another space that will push storage is the digital media industry.

POOJA SHARMA

poojas@cybermedia.co.in