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The explosion of data and its management is driving the storage market to glory. New data intensive applications and access to data from across geographically distributed sites are the key storage drivers. As enterprises looked at various means to efficiently manage data, Storage technologies evolved in tandem. So from DAS, storage evolved to NAS and to SAN. We are right now in a phase where enterprises look at three key storage parameters-simplicity, efficiency and speed.

Here we are in the SAN and beyond stage wherein the technology challenges revolve around ground realities like compliance, effective utilization of the data center, and remote back up, scaling storage and disaster recovery. To manage the plethora of challenges and much more, enterprises need to constantly evolve their storage architectures so that they are agile enough to adapt to the changing business scenarios.

Pointers from Before
We saw the escalation of the trend of enterprises migrating to NAS/SAN from DAS. If we look at the adoption of technologies, Fiber Channel (FC) SAN, despite being regarded as expensive in an Indian context, became the preferred option for block level storage access requirements. The key growth drivers for FC SAN came from verticals such as banks and telecom as they looked at higher data reliability and integrity. FC SAN speeds also ramped from previous year's 2 Gbps to 4 Gbps. The higher speeds came in as a boon for data centers which leveraged the same for high-speed data replication.

Yet another key trend relates to IP SAN. The escalating popularity of IP SAN can be attributed to its benefits and manageability. For instance IP SAN uses TCP/IP and is based on the iSCSI protocol and runs on the enterprises' existing LAN. Even though the market out there for IP SAN is just opening up in an Indian context, it is expected to ramp up significantly. The year went by also drove home the point that compliance is here to stay. And for vendors it turned as a big business opportunity as they became ready for compliance standards like Sarbanes Oxley, Basel II among others.

Meanwhile, the secondary storage market continues to be a necessary part of the Indian storage market. So tape and disk based back up continue to co-exist with larger cousins like SAN and NAS. We saw this segment becoming more intelligent with tape drives incorporating more advanced features. Verticals like IT, BFSI and telecom drove the tape drive market. On the disk side of things, disk to disk was the front-runner with tape going in for archival and long term back up usage.

• Storage Virtualization: Nothing new about it. We have been hearing about it for quite some time. But it seems that over the next five years, storage virtualization in all its forms will emerge as a critical battleground in the storage industry as per a new study based on IDC's Storage Virtualization Survey. Storage virtualization is expected to drive changes in storage systems architectures and will spur significant investments in new storage software solutions and potentially disrupt the current competitive environment. IDC says that storage virtualization has come of age. It's no longer a nascent market with limited user deployments and immature technology. Majority of those surveyed by IDC are evaluating storage virtualization solutions, and 34% have already implemented such a solution.

• Wide-area File Services (WAFS): As consolidation gained momentum in the last few years, enterprises have created centralized data repositories. In a consolidated environment how does one manage data and aspects like file sharing? Here, a technology that is increasingly debated is WAFS. This is a storage technology that facilitates access to a remote data center as if it is local. The key benefit of WAFS is that any enterprise having distributed entities or having many branch offices can centrally manage data back ups on real time basis.

• Storage Security: During 2006 data theft became a focal point of discussion. Whether it is a large storage environment or laptops of mobile executives-the data stored is indeed the digital asset. Given the escalation of threat to security of data, CIOs across the world will focus more on security. For instance, scenarios like a tape being sent to another location or a disk based back up. With storage devices becoming mobile-a case in point is huge capacity thumb drives that carry critical enterprise data needs to be managed efficiently. All these come with huge security issues and CIOs need to find more foolproof methods to contain security breaches.

• iSCSI SAN: With distinct cost and manageability advantages, iSCSI or IP SAN will become mainstream from its current hype phase in India. It will increasingly compete with FC SAN and more enterprises will explore deploying iSCSI. Moreover, all leading vendors aggressively targeting iSCSI only indicates that the market maturing out during 2007. As per a recent report from IDC, iSCSI is expected to garner 10% of the storage systems revenue by 2008.

• Thin Provisioning: A step towards intelligent management of storage, thin provisioning is now seen in the storage horizon that would generate lots of interest. In simple terms thin provisioning is a predictive way of allocating storage even before the need arises, so that the host always gets the storage.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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