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 Storage
DAS users go in for network storage
With the exponential increase in data capacity,
it has become imperative for companies to gradually move away from
DAS to NAS and SAN as networked storage offers higher storage capacity
and is easier to manage says Akhtar Pasha
As per the preliminary IDC Q3 2002 Tracker
report, the disk storage market was valued at $72.1 million during
Q1 to Q3 2002. The new HP dominates that market space with a 36.3
percent marketshare with $26.2 million in revenues. IBM is the runner
up with a 18.3 percent, while Sun comes in third with 11.5 percent
market share from $8.3 million revenues.
 The
external storage market was valued at $40.5 million with a total
of 706,303 GB shipped between Q1 to Q3 of 2002. HP was the clear
winner with 32.5 percent market share and $13.2 million in revenues.
Network Appliance moved up from third position to second with a
19.7 percent market share valued at $8 million in revenues. IBM
with $6.5 million and Sun with $4 million held the third and fourth
place respectively.
Naveen Mishra, senior analyst for computing
products research group at IDC India says, “Enterprises are
concerned about data protection, business continuity and disaster
recovery and all these are contributing to the growth of the enterprise
storage market in India.” IDC says verticals like IT, ITES,
telecom, education, government and BFSI have been the key spenders
on storage solutions. Efforts are on to give concrete shape to the
concept of storage virtualisation in the Indian market.
The other significant factor driving the
growth of storage is the implementation of enterprise applications
such as ERP, CRM and data warehousing. These apps involve tremendous
data analysis and distribution, all of which require storage.
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| Companies that have gone in
for disaster recovery (DR) solutions last year are looking at
adding one or more disaster recovery sites this year, says Avijit
Basu |
Trend
Storage consultancy
This area is expected to witness massive growth in India. HP’s
revenues from this niche grew 100 percent.
Meanwhile, Movinture Storage Network, a
start-up company, has forayed into this space. Storage consultancy
involves consulting and storage services in designing and managing
enterprise Storage Area Networks (SANs). Movinture plans to get
$1,50,000 revenues from storage consulting in the next one year.
Adaptive storage
Rana Dutta, regional director for APAC at Movinture Storage Networks
says, “Instead of reinvesting in storage, an enterprise’s
goal should be to manage its storage growth and make efficient use
of capacity with integrated storage management tools for interoperability.
The better way to do it will be to have a utility-based adaptive
storage architecture. HP is strongly pushing this architecture in
India.”
Adaptive storage enables an enterprise
to use a single console to manage disk subsystems from multiple
vendors.
Disaster management
now an essential
Companies that have gone in for disaster recovery (DR) solutions
last year are looking at adding one or more disaster recovery sites
this year. Avijit Basu, marketing manager for NSSO at HP India says,
“Companies are looking at increasing their number of DR sites.
We had implemented a DR solution for Global Trust Bank in Hyderabad
and recently we set up another DR site for the company in Mumbai.”
GE Capital, which uses NetApp’s solution for DR has gone in
for five DR sites with each one of the sites backing up the other.
Networked storage
T Srinivasan, the country manager for EMC India says, “80 percent
of businesses are still on server attached storage. Therefore, the
opportunity for networked storage is big.” EMC strategy and
focus will be on storage management, business continuity and DR.
HP’s Basu says, “Because of storage consolidation, we
see growth in investment on high-end storage infrastructure. These
include automated backup and SAN implementation.”
When data capacity increases, DAS will
not be able to handle it. Given the exponential data growth, it
is imperative for any company to gradually move away from direct
access storage (DAS) to networked storage (NAS and SAN). IDC’s
Mishra
says, “Unified storage sees concepts like NAS and SAN converging.”
| Disk storage |
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| External storage |
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Storage management
software
According to an IDC study done in 2001, 13 percent of data centre
costs are dedicated to software, 29 percent to hardware and the
remaining 48 percent is spent on labour. Thus, software costs are
actually the smallest piece of the pie. By selecting the right software,
companies spend a larger percentage on software, but less on hardware
and labour. The advantage in doing so, is that the entire pie becomes
smaller, so overall costs are actually reduced. “E-mail, video,
digital imaging and audio information are contributing to a massive
explosion in storage capacity. Applications like backup and restore
will drive the storage management software market in India,”
says Arun Rao, national manager for storage at Computer Associates.
Vendors addressing this market include EMC, Legato, Veritas and
Computer Associates.
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| As 80 percent of businesses
are still on server attached storage, the opportunity for network
storage is big, says T Srinivasan |
Agendra Kumar, country manager for Veritas
India says, “If you can make your disks stretch farther, you
reduce hardware costs. Effective storage software lowers the cost
of disks by allowing departments and applications to pool their
storage resources.”
Lowering the cost of labour is the second
value of software. Automating processes that previously required
manpower means that it takes fewer specialists to keep a data centre
up and running. Veritas offers management tools such as VERITAS
SANPoint Control that automate those processes.
Vendors pin their
hopes on iSCSI
Mishra of IDC India says, “Suitable interconnects such as SCSI,
fibre channel and especially iSCSI, will ensure smooth data accessibility
and availability.” In Inda, iSCSI is still a new concept, and
it may take 18 months for actual deployments to kick off. Nevertheless
the opportunity is there. According to Gartner, SAN will bring 49
percent while NAS 32 percent of revenue in Indian external disk
storage in 2005. It projects the total market for storage in India
to reach Rs 2,000 crore in 2003. A growth that seems quite realistic
given the fact that SAN and NAS are growing at 60 to 80 percent
respectively.
Since fibre channel-based SANs require
big investments and have distance limitations, the industry is now
looking at iSCSI to solve the problem. Anal K Jain, managing director
for India & SAARC at Network Appliance Systems (India) says,
“New installations of iSCSI will come from organisations that
are using DAS. Using iSCSI, enterprises can do both file and block
access over IP; this was not possible earlier. Enterprise customers
need not invest separately for file and block access any longer.”
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| New installations of iSCSI
will come from organisations that are using DAS, says Anal K
Jain |
Storage Area Networks today use fibre channel
to connect disk arrays, switches and servers that are expensive
to set-up. There are a number of advantages of using iSCSI for SAN.
One is that fibre channel uses Host Bus Adopter for network interfaces,
which is four times costly as a network interface card. iSCSI uses
IP technology that is easily understood and widely deployed. The
other advantage of using IP is that enterprises can connect at speeds
up to 10 Gbps. Fibre channel cannot be used over long distances
and is limited to 10 kilometres. Lastly, there is more trained manpower
available on IP than on fibre.
Jain adds, “The future of enterprise
storage is iSCSI over IP and it promises to bring the best of both
worlds—SAN and NAS—to customers by leveraging their existing
technology investments and giving them new life in a network-centric
storage era.”
Networking vendors such as Cisco, Nortel,
and 3Com have announced their plans to bring iSCSI products into
the market. Pure storage vendors like Network Appliance have already
announced products that support iSCSI. Jain says, “Our strategy
will be to give free upgrades for iSCSI to our customers who are
using FAS900 series and F800.”
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has similar
plans. It has a collaborative agreement with Nishan Systems, a manufacturer
of multi-protocol storage switches in the IP SAN fabric and SAN
extension market. V Vivekanand, business development manager at
HDS says, “We are planning to integrate iSCSI with our Lightling
9900V products in the next six months.”
Overall storage revenues are expected to
grow marginally in 2003-04. BFSI, telecom and SMEs are expected
to drive the Indian storage market. In secondary storage, DLT Super
drives like Ultrium are picking up rapidly.
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Hitachi Data Systems
Many do not know that India's first SAN implementation was
done by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) for a national long distance
(NLD) carrier, back in 1998. During that time HDS was operating
out of Singapore. The company came to India through channels
in April 2001. Its strategy was to focus on specific customers
and it
initially focused on verticals like the IT services company,
manufacturing, petrochemicals and banking. HDS works with
partners like Apara, Tata Infotech and Lanbit and has an OEM
relationship with HP and Sun. Sun is also its reseller partner
for the Lightning 9900V range of products.
V Vivekanand, business development
manager of HDS says, ”We have grown from a one member
team to six members for support sales development. Our plan
for 2003 is to add four more people to fuel the pre-sales
and post sales support.” He adds that HDS’s focus
has changed from addressing the infrastructure-storage sub-systems
to storage management solutions like business continuance,
rapid recovery solution and DR. Last year HDS created a separate
division for services to bring out pre-packaged solution to
customers.
HDS is bringing a basket of products
and services to customers. One would be ‘SAN SLAs.’
Says Vivekanand, “End-customers are using range of products
from different storage vendors and each of them have separate
SLA. The cost of managing this SLA is high. We have seen one
vendor blaming the other in case of any discrepancy. In this
situation the customer’s business suffers. In this service
we will manage the SLA for customers irrespective of the products
they are using from several vendors.” Enablement-services
are another offering from HDS, wherein it helps customers
to explore and utilise the software to the fullest.
HDS has separated its offering
into two categories—core infrastructure and edge storage
solutions. Core infrastructure is for a centralised storage
solution, where HDS will be using the Lightning 9900V range
of products. This category currently contributes 85 percent
of its total business. Edge storage solution is for distributed
storage architecture using the Thunder 9500 products. The
company says it will try to focus on gaining exposure for
these solutions in 2003-04. Vivekanand says, ”We have
a steady relationship with Sun Microsystems for core infrastructure
solution. Therefore, our focus will be to get into the SME
market. Using distributed storage, SMEs can store non-mission-critical
data with Thunder 9500. The cost will be 50
percent cheaper than core products." To strengthen its
channels for the SME market, HDS is looking at tying up with
two distributors with system integration skills.
Currently HDS has five large
projects that will be completed in March 2003 along with Sun
Microsystems. HDS is expecting to increase its revenues by
80 percent in calendar year 2003 from the $14 million achieved
in 2002. Currently, the revenue split from enterprise and
SME stands at 70:30, but in CY 2003 this ratio should be 50:50.
HDS’s focus will be to get
into the SME market. Using distributed storage, SMEs can store
non-mission-critical data with Thunder 9500, says V Vivekanand
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Network Appliance
Barely 10 months after setting up its Indian operations, NetApp
has made remarkable progress. It has opened sales offices
in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi and has increased its channel
presence. Apara, Wipro, WeP and CMS are its channel partners
in India. Its customers include Texas Instruments, GE Capital,
Cisco, Intel, Motorola and Times Internet. Last year, the
company won some big projects from ICICI Bank (NAS), Aviva,
GE Capital and Kotak Mahindra. GE uses NetApp products for
DR at five sites. NetApp is focusing on chip design, financial
services and telecommunications verticals.
Between Q1 to Q3 of 2002, the
company has moved up from third-rank to runner up behind HP,
in the external storage market. The company reported $8 million
revenues with a market share of 19.7 percent. NetApp’s
products range from $3,000 to $ 20,000 for low-end products
like F87, to sub $50,000 for 4-6 TB requirement (F825) to
high-end products like FAS 960 for $ 1 million.
Anal K Jain, managing director
for India & SAARC at Network Appliance Systems (India)
says, “NetApp’s focus will be centred around unified
storage. Customers want a single platform that can handle
both SAN and NAS.” The company plans to spend Rs 1.5
crore to promote its unified storage solutions. NetApp’s
strategy is to become the number one vendor within the next
three years. Oil and gas is a new vertical and it has ONGC
and Saudi Aramco as its customers.
NetApp is bullish about its new
offering. Jain says, “We see iSCSI deployments in the
first half of 2003, and it will take a bite out of fibre channel.”
NetApp is offering iSCSI as a 2nd protocol for its F800 and
FAS900 products.
NetApp’s focus will be centred
around unified storage. Customers want a single platform that
can handle both SAN and NAS, says Anal Jain
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HP India
HP is the undisputed leader in both disk and external storage.
It continues to focus on secondary storage market selling
DLT Super Drive (Ultrium library). Avjit Basu says, “In
the tape business where average selling price is falling,
we see a demand for Ultrium tape drives. Since the price gap
is narrowing, and the drives are getting faster, we saw the
business from tape increasing. We are selling 50 to 60 Ultrium
DLT Super Drives per month.” HP’s strong presence
in the banking and telecom sector helped it garner a couple
of big projects in 2002. It won a consolidation and DR project
from BPCL.
Basu says, ”HP’s focus
will be on business continuity and disaster recovery management
that would need high availability, remote backup and disk
arrays with features like no single point of failure and five
nines uptime in SAN infrastructure." The other focus
area of HP will be to offer its customers to move their DR
site from one location to other locations. “We are helping
Global Trust Bank to set up their DR sites in Hyderabad and
Mumbai. We have deployed a number of SAN solutions using MS1000
that help customers to move from DAS to SAN.”
During 2003-04, HP will try to
promote its Adaptive storage solution—managing storage
across hardware and OS platforms. However, HP will continue
to focus on the secondary storage market—TO/Ultrium and
autoloaders, libraries.
During 2003-04, HP will try
to promote its Adaptive storage solutions, managing storage
across hardware and OS platforms, says Avijit Basu
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New storage paradigms
- DAS doesn’t scale
- Islands of storage are hard
and costly to manage
- Move storage onto a network—SAN
or NAS
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| iSCSI |
FC |
| One network to manage |
Two networks |
| IP card is cheaper |
FC card costs is high |
| No distance limitations |
Limited to 10 kms |
| High connecting speed |
Slow |
| Plenty of trained manpower
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Limited and expensive
manpower |
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