Cover Story

Intelligent storage management

The spotlight is firmly on storage software with storage management solutions occupying pride of place. By Faiz Askari

Software is touted to be the next growth driver for the Indian storage market. With the writing on the wall what with hardware prices in free fall, vendors are betting on software and services to fatten their bottom-lines. These solutions have become more important as the amount of information that companies need to store continues to grow with flat or little growth in the number of people who manage these systems. Storage software automates the task of managing storage gear making it less labour intensive and economical.

Storage software revenues went up by 38 percent from 2004-05, backup and archival software sales totted up to Rs 61 crore constituting 47 percent of the overall storage software market. However, storage replication software and storage resource management categories showed more impressive growth with 82 percent and 64 percent respectively. Storage software was incidentally one of the strongest performers in the overall IT market as a result of growing interest in data protection and tighter legislation around data storage.

Currently, the market for storage management software is largely driven by companies operating in a data-intensive environment. For instance the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom segments are considered to be the highest spenders in technology and consequently are the biggest markets for storage. In technologically savvy banks, data is stored in a central repository, to be retrieved through various delivery channels like ATMs (automated teller machines), phone banking and Internet banking in real-time. This is possible only by virtue of advanced storage management tools and networked storage. The financial services sector is seen as a key adopter of this technology. “Verticals where the maximum potential exists and capital is being invested on a large scale for storage consolidation include banking, telecom, FMCG, petrochemicals and the pharmaceutical sector.”

"It has become paramount for organisations to consolidate and manage their information better to which end they are investing in storage management software" - PK Gupta Director Product Management-APJ EMC Software

However, justifying the growing importance of storage management among Indian CIOs or their IT infrastructure, PK Gupta Director Product Management-APJ, EMC Software says, “It has become paramount for organisations to consolidate and manage their information better. Organisations are investing in storage management software and not just hardware.” EMC has transitioned from being a hardware-centric company to a complete information management company offering a wide portfolio of hardware, software and services. Gupta adds, “The shift in EMC revenues from 73 percent hardware and 27 percent software and services to 47 percent hardware and 53 percent software and services is indicative of the fact that EMC is committed to strengthening its storage management software portfolio.”

Commenting on the Indian storage management market, Shailesh Agarwal - Country Manager - IBM Storage, IBM India says, “Storage Management in India is still in a nascent stage. We have been experiencing tremendous growth in storage consumption and this rapid growth is leading to management challenges. IT managers are beginning to realize these potential issues and are beginning to address them.”

Further highlighting the perspective of how to manage the growing storage needs, Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, Network Appliance Systems (India) says, “The automation of storage management processes has become evident and the ability to offer an application-integrated storage management toolset is becoming an important criteria when CIOs evaluate various storage vendors.” In addition to this, inefficient storage management practices can also waste the time of other IT staff members.

"We are looking at storage management as an important and integrated function of infrastructure management" - Anthony Chan Vice President and General Manager StorageWorks Division HP Asia Pacific and Japan

Anthony Chan vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, HP Asia Pacific and Japan says, “We are looking at the storage management as an important and integrated function of the overall infrastructure management. This is because of an effective storage monitoring leads to efficient management. As far as CIOs are concerned, today they clearly know what benefits they can get out of storage management portfolio.”

Manoj Suvarna country head India storage works division of HP further emphasises, “In the face of explosive data growth, we are focused on simplifying storage for customers with the latest and most innovative technologies.”

"Storage management is the greatest challenge, especially in India as we embraced storage very late" - Sunny John Country Manager India Quantum

Sunny John, Country Manager for India at Quantum says, “Storage management is the greatest challenge and especially in India as we embraced storage very late.” Data management is defined broadly into transaction oriented and small files and large, static files. Quantum StorNext management software can address the area of large, static data files that are found in the area of satellite imagery, research & development, seismic (Oil exploration) and broadcast & media.

Sai Gundavelli, Founder & CEO, SOLIX Technologies says, “Most storage solution providers agree that IT heads of Indian companies are serious about their storage infrastructure and understand that the storage and security of data is of high importance. Currently, Indian organisations are on the learning curve. Everyday more and more organisations realise the importance of having storage software solutions for their networks.”

The end-user storage experience

When the needs of the dynamic enterprise inevitably change—often quickly and even dramatically—traditional storage management processes require reprovisioning, which causes disruption and increases management overhead and risk. Aggarwal of NetApp added, “To address this, IT organisations often must over provision systems and preallocate resources, which are costly and lead to poor utilisation. Moreover, traditional storage systems do not allow the flexibility to release un-used capacity and re-allocate said capacity, non-disruptively, to those applications or users that need additional resources.”

Addressing the issues surrounding sub-optimal utilisation levels has been a constant focus for CIOs.  Agarwal of IBM says, “This usage model is merely a result of the proliferation of storage. Storage Management has utilisation monitoring as a part of its broad function. Factual data with respect to utilisation levels will help with better provisioning, capacity planning and also to deploy and fine-tune IT policies.”

"Exponential data growth, OS overheads, the advent of SRM, distributed content and data mining triggered by technologies like multimedia, wireless and video on demand are the challenges" - Pravir Arora Head Channels CA India and SAARC

Pravir Arora, Head Channels, CA India and SAARC says, “CIOs today face storage challenges caused by exponential data growth due to new applications, OS overheads, the advent of SRM, distributed content, data mining etc triggered by new technologies like multimedia, wireless data, video on demand etc.” The management of data in such an environment becomes complex due to these dynamics.

While talking about the demand of an intelligent user experience, Atul Sood, Regional Director, Hitachi Data Systems India says, “It becomes extremely important to analyse, who is doing or using what, in an IT environment. Analysing this aspect is key. Storage management solutions can provide this analysis from a customer’s standpoint. Hence this solution is capable of suggesting the required type of storage and how it may be best utilised.”

Other modules allow IT staff members outside the storage domain to provision additional storage as needed and create regular backups. Aggarwal adds, “All of these privileges are managed and audited by storage administrative staff. For most storage administrators, managing corporate risk i.e. focusing on data protection, environmental reliability, and litigation support, takes the highest priority.”

Apart from this, one should always measure the amount and significance of current data, look at the organisation’s business plans and try to estimate the growth in data making a few reasonable assumptions, and forecast the longevity of systems. A three year life span is reasonable. Secondly, the benefits provided by storage management software cannot be sidelined.

By implementing a storage management system in the organisation, a CIO can continue to use existing infrastructure for a longer period of time without adding hardware. John of Quantum says, “This can be done by consolidating the available storage infrastructure across FC, SATA and tape and moving static data from expensive FC disks to cost-effective SATA disks and finally archiving it to Tape.”

Effective information lifecycle management has enabled organisations to bring about policy-driven automation, and which means that companies have a clear understanding of different data types and their value to the organisation at any given point of time. Gundavelli, of SOLIX Technologies says, “An unified view of all the relevant storage hardware and software tools help organisations cope with the unpredictable and fluctuating value of information. To control burgeoning data, organisations are keenly looking at effective information lifecycle management, which means that organisations are drawing an optimal mix of storage resource availability, placement, protection and management of data from the time it was first created until it is no longer needed for business.”

An intelligent user interface

Today’s IT environment demands a smarter user interface and this trend continues in storage management as well. John puts across his views on this trend of interactive user interface by saying, “Quantum’s strategy for its tape drives, tape libraries and disk-based backup systems is to develop integrated solutions that improve the user experience. Application and solution providers, larger customers and Quantum partners can tune StorNext and benefit from, for example, quality of service, on-demand data movement and retrieval and a more robust reporting and monitoring capability set through specific API calls to the StorNext iMover, file system and client code base.”

A storage management solution should be flexible enough to incorporate incremental changes and also prepare the organisation for revolutionary changes through an inbuilt integrated lifecycle management capability. Arora says, “Storage interoperability is another major challenge. Existing legacy systems need to integrate with newer technology and there is a need for faster access of data to cater to disparate users spread across geographies. Simultaneous access to data across distributed application and management platforms also relates to the rising expectations of a scalable storage solution.”

Sood comments, “CIOs have to deliver optimal results with fewer resources. Storage management solutions are cost-effective.”

Networking storage

Companies require large SANs and need to simplify the management of networks. Managing multiple SAN islands with many points of management can become a complex proposition. Enterprise storage networking infrastructures are evolving rapidly in order to meet three main business requirements:

• Reduce CapEx/OpEx.
• Increase agility to support changing business priorities, application requirements and revenue growth.
• Improve SAN extension infrastructures for long distance replication, backup and recovery to meet regulatory requirements and industry best practices.

Additionally, as enterprise SANs grow, end-users are also cautious about the lack of effective troubleshooting tools for storage networks. Sumit Mukhija, Business Development Manager-Storage, Cisco India & SAARC says, “Many users lack the confidence to build large SANs—partly due to the lack of troubleshooting tools and the complexity caused by the need to manage many ISLs across multiple SAN islands.”

Therefore, users are looking for more in their management tools as they make choices for growing their enterprise SANs, using differing protocols to create efficient business continuity solutions, and cost-effective solutions built to withstand SAN changes.

As data grows, there is a need to consolidate it in a way that it is available to users across the enterprise in a timely and consistent manner. In addition to this, Mukhija also says, “This is where solutions like Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) that offers enterprises and organisations with multiple branch offices the benefits of centralized storage with local file services. WAAS helps enable companies to consolidate servers and storage and centralise backup and disaster recovery processes, while providing fast, near-LAN file access across the WAN.”

A security-driven scenario

Security is becoming one of the biggest challenges for companies, both large and small. The penalties for data security breaches have become significant, with heavy fines mandated which can no longer be ignored.

While elaborating importance of security in storage management, John adds, “Our security framework is a comprehensive and robust set of security offerings for backup, recovery and archive processes. Being a storage vendor we have introduced a number of new security features in our tape drive products, ranging from password protection on tape media (to act as a deterrent if stolen), through to supplying encryption devices to work with hardware backup solutions.”

From a networking perspective, Mukhija says, “Traditional storage environments were considered secure because they were a dedicated extension to the computing systems they serviced. As dedicated storage and smaller SANs are consolidated into larger SANs, storage managers cannot depend on security through isolation.” Where storage networks are extended beyond the data centre environment, security is required across metropolitan and wide-area networks.

Addressing security for standalone tape drives, tape cartridges, tape automation and disk-based backup systems, this framework encompasses Secured Data Access, Secured access to storage systems (HTTPS, SSH, etc), password protection, dministrative access or role based access control and physical access.

Driving forces

Explosive data growth is the primary driver. The other major driver is a shortage of experienced storage management experts, which basically means that tools with a high degree of automation and application integration are vital. Aggarwal of NetApp says, “What CIOs are looking for is to reduce the overall complexity of their environments and storage management can play an important role here.”

Data is growing at 50 percent per annum, according to a study by Forrester: Trends 2006: Database Management Systems. The need is for active archiving of historical data to improve application and system performance, while continuing to retain data for compliance purposes, in the same format as the original application and maintaining data protection to comply with security legislations and business mandates.

“Indian companies are also regulated by the Income Tax and other acts to preserve data for a certain number of years and secondly also preserve the application output such as payroll records/bank statements etc., need to store the documents while preserving the metadata of the documents. E-mail archiving/audit will be a driver for Indian companies.

Active archiving also helps to reduce the total cost of data management—including total storage costs. If nothing is done, the 50 percent per annum growth of data overcompensates for the 35 percent per annum reduction in per GB storage costs, and hence results in storage budgets increasing every year.

Roadmap and roadblocks

Storage management software is poised to carve a bigger piece of the storage pie for itself. Storage software in India has grown rapidly with demand for Storage Resource Management (SRM) software coming from large enterprises and for backup and recovery software from SMEs. Going forward storage management software such as SRM and replication software will be the biggest growth drivers in India.

Suvarna says, “The HP StorageWorks MSA60 and MSA70 are key enablers of HP Adaptive Infrastructure, which allows customers to lower costs as well as increase speed, reliability and performance as they look to build next-generation data centres.”

As per IDC India estimates, SRM and replication software are set to become the highest growing segments in storage software market. The enterprise storage resource management (SRM) segment will be the principal drivers of growth in worldwide , growing more than 30 percent year-on-year. Enterprises are looking at investing in solutions that enable them to manage storage devices, resources and connectivity from a single central console using SRM tools.