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Finding Panacea
Given the challenges, enterprises, in one way or another, struggle to manage their storage infrastructure and are on a constant lookout for unbundling complexities. Network storage topologies, NAS and SAN, are the two most popular methods for managing storage. If we look at the NAS space, it started as a storage technology for sharing data within engineering organizations, primarily in the UNIX environments. NAS also gained rapid acceptance in the Web services space with its ability to serve files to a large number of users simultaneously. With the proliferation of Microsoft technologies, NAS added multi-protocol (Windows and UNIX) support for users. Experts say that NAS made the process of data consolidation and data sharing incredibly simpler, and organizations from different industry verticals started putting more applications on the NAS system. The NAS systems too evolved in terms of performance, scalability, and availability. Reflecting on this, Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, Network Appliance, says The NAS market in India is forecast to grow at roughly 20% year-on-year. Some of the key verticals driving these numbers are: IT services, engineering design, and Web services, among others. NAS is widely used and accepted as a mature technology leveraging on industry standard protocols like NFS and CIFS.

Today, NAS is evolving to support even large storage clusters in high performance computing grids where the performance/scalability requirements are beyond the capabilities of a single storage system. Grid architecture is best implemented on an IP-based infrastructure due to ease of implementation and lower costs. Agarwal adds, NAS would be the architecture of choice for storage grids. Another interesting trend is the adoption of NAS to centralize desktop/laptop back-up and remote office back-up. In fact, in large organizations, the ability to back remote users is becoming an increasingly critical challenge. Vendors also say that over the year, customers realized the availability and utilization issues associated with direct-attached storage (DAS) and started investing in network storage. Large enterprises as well as SMEs realized that the existing storage infrastructure has to be augmented to handle the rapidly growing data in enterprises.

Storage vendors are also providing services around storage consolidation to help customers align their architectures with their business requirements. Take the case of Symantec, which recently announced the launch of Storage United, a new business initiative designed to help enterprise storage professionals address root causes behind the growing cost and complexity of their storage environments. Symantecs Storage United strategy provides a software-oriented approach to enable heterogeneous data center environments to unite their diverse storage platforms, their isolated islands of storage administration, and storage operations with the business by delivering storage as a service.

Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec, India and SAARC, says, Most large and medium sized businesses are now treating storage as a separate entity from servers and have realized the merits of network storage over traditional DAS. As this realization grows, network storage will grow much faster than the server market. Storage consolidation will increasingly be the norm, as it already is in the developed countries.

Meanwhile, on the SAN side, what is driving adoption is the information growth that is largely in the database-based applications and emails, and the nature of these applications demand fast access to storage, which can be provided only by the SAN deployments. L Sivashankaran, director, Storage, Sun Microsystems India, says, We see a great boost in the mid-size market for these applications resulting in the highest growth for mid-range SAN deployments. The enterprise customers are consolidating their infrastructure and looking for tiered storage in SAN to optimize cost, while meeting up to their performance SLAs. Vendors, meanwhile, agree that though customers are deploying SAN for the above applications, they continue to prefer NAS for applications which require file serving and sharing. Clearly, both SAN and NAS will co-exist, although NAS deployments shall be further limited to deploying NAS headers in front of the SAN, and thereby provide unified storage architecture.

NAS and SAN have specific strengths and are used for defined purposes. Says Chugh The adoption of these technologies is dependent on the business requirements, cost and value acquired through the technology. For example, you typically see a SAN being implemented where there is a mission critical ERP system running, while a NAS is typically deployed by R&D arms or software development centers. The key factor here is that NAS does have a cost advantage and has a higher adoption rate among customers who would place more emphasis on file sharing and are not using high performance applications. Going by the implications, one can say that SAN will not cannibalize the NAS market and both will continue to co-exist.

Once SAN is in place, the next set of challenges relate to the post-SAN phase. Experts say that the biggest challenge enterprises face post the SAN deployment is the data classification required for tiered storage implementation and management of the storage infrastructure, including the backup operations and tape libraries. Other challenges faced are the right backup architecture and optimal sizing for the backup operations.

Benefits of Virtualization
CIOs as well as industry experts say that virtualization is a beneficial technology as it helps in providing a single interface for management and provisioning of multiple storage products of different make and models. Increasingly, the enterprise customers appreciate it greatly, due to a typical nature of the SAN deployment. Virtualization has now been added with another key feature of thin provisioning which allows virtual allocation of disk space (volumes) thereby bringing a lot of benefits to customers in not only managing, but also reducing the cost of ownership.

According to Shailesh Agarwal of IBM India, Consolidation and virtualization are two technologies that characterize every IT deployment. Virtualization is real and most of our customers insist on it. Enterprises have now started evolving a framework for virtualization of their IT infrastructure. We at IBM strongly believe that virtualization is a key requirement as it brings in high degree of business agility.

While market acceptance of virtualization has been slow, enterprise-class storage virtualization solutions have gained footprints in the market. Chugh says, Companies that have large, diverse and complex IT environments, and are looking to simplify the management of these environments, are increasingly implementing virtualization solutions. Verticals where we have seen an early interest have been in the telecommunications, financial services, and retail industries. But, its certainly not confined to these verticals.

In storage, it is not one solution that fits all. In order to evolve a successful storage backbone, enterprises need to adopt a multi-pronged approach. There is SAN, NAS and the tape, and concepts like ILM and virtualization, that make for a converged storage environment. A good storage infrastructure is the one that adopts all these storage techniques and aligns it as per business requirements.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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