Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

The data storage industry is one of the most dynamic sectors in information technology today. Largely, due to the introduction of high-performance networking between servers and storage assets, storage technology has undergone a rapid transformation as one innovation after another has pushed storage solutions forward. At the same time, the viability of new storage technologies is repeatedly affirmed by the rapid adoption of networked storage virtually by every large enterprise and institution. Businesses, governments, and institutions today depend on information, and information in its unrefined form as data ultimately resides somewhere on storage media.

Milestones
The evolution of the storage industry can be divided in terms of three major milestones. It originated with the mainframe, which was a gigantic computer that could run all the programs in a large business. All the computer stuff was gathered in one place called a data center. All the storage that the mainframe needs was directly connected to it.

The PC revolution helped data to spread out and was moved off the mainframe and stared in sewer computers in the 80's. The servers were then dispersed throughout the enterprise to bring computing power closer to the actual users. This came to be known in the industry as DAS where the hardware is connected to an individual server.

Post DAS, storage moved to the next level in the early 90s when a network or LAN connected servers. A great deal of data was scattered, and managing all the data dispersed throughout the network became a nightmare. This saw the advent of SAN in the mid-nineties. NAS, a variation of SAN, came into the picture in early 2000. Today 70-75% of the storage market is ruled by SAN or NAS or variation of the two.

Since the early 90s, storage innovation has produced a steady stream of new technology solutions, including Fibre Channel, network-attached storage (NAS), server clustering, serverless backup, high-availability dual-pathing, point-in-time data copy (snapshots), shared tape access, storage over distance, iSCSI, CIM (common information model)-based management of storage assets and transports, and storage virtualization.

A Growing Market
Today, storage requirements are driven increasing volumes of data, a growing understanding that all data needs to be protected and most importantly, compliance. According to industry sources, while data is growing at around 50-60% globally, this data is growing at the pace of 80-100% y-o-y in India.

Last year, the external storage market grew by 39% while storage software grew by 38%. The overall network storage market grew at a phenomenal pace of 85% while DAS registered a negative growth of 18%. The SAN market grew at 90% while NAS grew at 68% in FY 2005-06. According to IDC, FY 2005-06 storage hardware revenue in India grows from $231 mn to $279 mn.

Last year, an interesting trend that picked up was the adoption of Fiber Channel (FC) SAN in the enterprise considered to be expensive hitherto. More than 90% of the SAN deployments in enterprise storage for block level storage access requirements were in the FC category.

Secondary storage grew at a more conservative pace of 11%. Says Jim Simon, marketing director, APAC, Quantum, "Enhancements in tape has kept pace with the dynamically evolving storage requirements in the enterprise." Tapes can enjoy a lifespan of up to 30 years as compared to an optical disk which can depreciate in quality in about five years time. Huge demand in tapes as storage devices in India can be assessed from the 8.1% CAGR growth over six years according to IDC. Storage software kept pace with external storage market to grow at 38%.

Vendor Landscape
Some of the key players in the market in external storage include big names like HP, IBM, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Network Appliances, among others.

Today, even storage players like NetApp and EMC have started providing services around storage. Says PK Gupta, director of product marketing, APJ and Korea at EMC, "Third party players are also active in the services around storage segment."

The secondary storage market in India is driven primarily by HP, IBM and Quantum. Sun Microsystems post its acquisition of StorageTek, also entered in to this space. Players like Quantum have introduced DLT-V4 drive for preventive and predictive diagnostic manageability.

Finally, as storage consolidation gains momentum, storage virtualization is seeing adoption in large enterprises. While enterprises are adopting storage virtualization at the SAN level, SMB where the trend is far less significant has been adopting storage virtualization at the server level.

Bhaswati Chakravorty
bhaswatic@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1