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Low cost SANs a hit in B&C class cities
Low-cost SAN solutions are growing in popularity amongst
enterprises for their branches in B&C class cities says Abhinav Singh
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E-mail, database and ERP applications running across
set-ups in B&C class cities are driving the adoption of low-cost SANs,
says Rajesh Janey |
Organisations operating out of B&C class cities whether
large or small are going in for low-cost SAN deployments. Today, a SAN deployment
is incomplete without companies setting up IP SANs at their branches in B&C
class cities and FC SAN or SAN appliances at the centralised head office.
Beyond the big city It has been observed by storage vendors that organisations
in B&C class cities have requirements for storage that are not too different
from their peers in class A cities. Rajesh Janey, director- Channels and Alliances,
EMC India & SAARC says, “E-mail, database and ERP applications running
across set-ups in B&C class cities are driving the adoption of low-cost
SANs.”
Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-Storage Solutions, IBM India says, “SANs
typically offer storage consolidation for multiple operating systems. Windows
and Linux are two of the most popular operating systems in B & C class cities.
It also offers higher performance due to use of FCAL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated
Loop) disks, higher availability due to NSPOF (No Single Point of Failure) disk
systems and a single point of management.”
Manufacturing & telecom drive growth
In B&C class cities there are a large number of manufacturing
firms who have some kind of ERP system or accounting platform and SCM (production
planning system) running across their set-up. Many companies in these towns
feel the need to migrate to low-cost SANs. P K Gupta, chairman, Storage Network
Industry Association (SNIA) India says, “Companies in B&C class cities
are moving from simple backup and recovery systems to high availability solutions
(low-cost SANs). Since low-cost SANs are easily manageable they do not require
specialised skills to manage storage.”
According to Gupta, manufacturing companies such as LML Motors in Kanpur, DCM
Shriram in Kota, Bajaj Auto and Cummins in Pune have either gone in for a low-cost
SAN or are contemplating one. Large manufacturing firms having smaller set ups
in B&C class cities want to ensure that non-mission critical data remains
on the low-cost SAN thereby resulting in cost savings for the organisation as
a whole.
K S Ramanujam, general manager, Data Management & Storage Business, Sun
Microsystems India says, “We observe that many contract manufacturing firms
and soft drink bottling plants for large set-ups are located in B&C class
cities. They generally go in for data capacities ranging from 5 to 10 TB, which
are very easily met by low-cost or entry-level SAN boxes.”
Cellular operators are also driving growth of low-cost SANs in B&C class
cities of India. Gupta explains, “Cellular operators such as Spice Telecom
in Chandigarh have gone in for a low-cost SAN deployment as they have to store
SMS messages of their subscribers. SMS messages are aiding the police in solving
some criminal cases.”
Low-cost IP-SAN preferred over costly FC-SANs
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The popularity of IP-SANs is been driven by lower
costs as compared to the traditional Fibre Channel SANs, says P K Gupta |
According to Gupta, the popularity of IP-SANs is driven by
their low costs when compared to traditional Fibre Channel SANs. That said even
some large organisations operating out of B&C class cities such as L&T
at Hazira are using IP-SAN. L&T uses products of Intransa, an IP-SAN vendor.
B Chandrasekhar, country manager, Intransa India, says, “Feature-heavy
consolidated storage environments, such as FC-SANs, are very expensive and beyond
the reach of most users in the B&C class cities, including those from the
SME segment. IP-SANs, on the other hand, offer all the features of a FC–SAN
but at a fraction of the cost and complexity.” A market analyst says that
an IP-SAN costs five-times less than FC-SAN. Intransa, a SAN vendor says that
IP-SANs are easy to implement. There is no retraining required to manage them,
they offer a single point for data management, capacity utilisation, data backup,
archival and disaster recovery.
Digitisation a boost to low-cost
SAN sales
Digitisation of documents is another trend in B&C class cities that will
drive sales of low-cost SANs. The judiciary system in small towns and e-governance
projects require digitisation [of records] and this is expected to lead to a
rise in demand for low-cost SANs.
In the next few quarters the momentum for IP-SANs in small towns is expected
to grow rapidly.
| L&T Hazira which is located near Surat has a
campus wide network consisting of a Cisco layer-3 switched network backbone
that serves traditional intranet services such as email, web, file, print
services as well ERP to its users. The campus has about 600 desktops.
In early 2004, L&T deployed a thin client solution on the campus network
to enable centralised network management and to reduce the complexity of
software administration and business continuity. It also deployed an Intransa
IP-SAN solution, as a storage backend for its thin-client solution. Built
around the Intransa IP5000 storage system, the IP-SAN simplifies management
and ensures availability of L&T Hazira’s growing information assets.
Goodbye DAS, Hello IP-SAN
DAS (mostly DLT tapes and DAT drives) was physically connected to host servers
through SCSI cabling. Over time, the limitations of DAS began to surface.
Since there are multiple storage and server pairs it becomes increasingly
difficult for IS staff to manage and track data on each individual server.
In early 2004, L&T Hazira decided to deploy an Intransa IP-SAN solution
as a storage backend to its thin-client solution deployed on its campus
wide network. V A Khargonkar assistant general manager-IT, L&T, Hazira
(in Surat) observes “With the Intransa IP-SAN solution, we are finally
able to manage our growing storage resources and deliver high data availability
across the enterprise network. It has also significantly lowered costs per
megabyte of data stored.”
Regarding the criteria for choosing the IP-SAN solution, he says, “We
were keen on a storage solution that made use of our existing skills sets.
The IP-SAN solution from Intransa could be implemented and managed with
no major training requirements for our staff. This certainly made a big
difference.”
Intransa IP-SAN-the best fit
The Intransa IP5000, an IP-based SAN solution, is a modular, IP-based block-storage
(Storage Area Network) array that offers scalability from 4TB up to 24TB.
The IP5000 leverages existing Ethernet network infrastructure to offer a
scalable solution at roughly one-fifth of the price of today’s Fibre
Channel SANs. Consisting of a storage controller module and a disk enclosure,
the IP5000 centralises storage devices to make them available across a network,
delivering better utilisation by reducing the need to purchase individual
servers to increase storage needs.
Storage provisioning ‘on the fly’
With the IP5000, L&T is now able to dynamically provision storage for
individual hosts and expand volumes for individual applications or users
with no disruptions or downtime on the server—a significant benefit
compared to its previous DAS configuration. Each time L&T needs to add
more storage capacity, all they need to do is mount a new disk enclosure
in the rack and plug the Ethernet cable to the Gigabit Ethernet switch.
The IP5000 storage controller automatically recognises the new disks and
makes free space available for the IT staff to provision host servers. The
iSCSI-based IP5000 also simplifies clustering and management of the storage
system with its StorControl Management Tool that allows IT administrators
to manage and monitor the entire IP5000 system, automate tasks and even
assign individual volumes.
No more back (up) pain
Each DAS island required data to be streamed across the network to the backup
and restore systems, leading to heavy network utilisation. In the past,
this was not an issue due to a big backup window. However, with its expanding
operations, L&T’s backup window has shrunk. Using the IP5000 intelligent
IP SAN architecture, L&T has created a centralised pool of storage devices
to ease its backup and restore methods and reduce the completion time. Backups
are now run directly on the back-end storage network rather than the user-facing
front-end network. An incremental backup of all the servers can be bypassed
altogether by leveraging Intransa Snapshot technology.
Additionally it [IP5000] helps instantaneous restoration from disk by mounting
the snapshot volume. Whereas its DAS configuration required tape cartridges
to be physically changed on each server, the IP5000 enables the continually
growing backup log files to be kept online, thereby facilitating quick identification
of archived data for restoration. The snapshot home directory can now be
set-up so that users can complete restoration on their own instantly, significantly
reducing help-desk requests to allow IT technicians to spend their time
on other projects. |
abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com
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