|
 |
Network storage was the flavor of the season, and helped see Year 2002-03 notch up a solid overall performance—and 9% growth |
|
As disk prices slipped even further through the year, a few large enterprises began disk-to-disk replication for faster data recovery |
|
Major storage vendors either reduced prices of high-end boxes or came up
with scaled-down versions—targeting smaller and medium enterprises |
|
As Indian enterprises came to grips with the intricacies of NAS and SAN,
adoption rates increased, eating into the share of direct-attached storage |
2002-03 was the coming-of-age year for the Indian storage industry—it grew
from being a niche market to end the year on a positive note, both for hardware
and software vendors. As businesses big and small began to realize the
criticality of their data and storage infrastructure, the year saw a
proliferation of sorts in business spending—sophisticated storage
infrastructure was in. Network storage options found greater favor, at the cost
of some percentage points for DAS.
Despite being 18 months in the past, 9.11 and its fallout continued to cast
its spell on the storage market, with an increasing number of enterprises coming
forward to implement disaster recovery and data replication solutions, driving
demand for hardware and software. While the trend of lower storage hardware
prices continued this year, the effect on vendor revenues was not as acutely
felt. The year ended with a growth of 6% in value terms, compared to a fall of
5% in the previous year, even as growth in volume terms matched last year’s
level of a whopping 70% (DQ-IDC India estimates).
Storage, hard and soft
Crashing disk and hardware prices meant more and more businesses could
afford sophisticated storage infrastructure. An interesting side-effect of
cheaper disks was that it encouraged large and medium enterprises to go in for
disk-based data replication solutions, abandoning tapes altogether.
Steadily-decreasing margins on hardware forced major vendors to focus more on
storage strategies. EMC demonstrated this trend as it took heavily to storage
management tools, even though it targeted only the high-end of the market. The
company tried to break into the mid-market on the hardware front by launching a
mid-range NAS device. Other software vendors Legato, CA and Veritas had their
products targeting at the mid- and lower segments, notably small and medium
enterprises.
The storage software market continued to grow rapidly—posting a spectacular
65% growth over last year—riding on the back of increased enterprise spending
on applications like disaster recovery, business continuity planning and high
availability. Growing awareness among Indian enterprises about the availability
of solutions offering these enhanced features acted as a catalyst for growth. As
data continued to grow beyond the ‘manageable’, need for software-controlled
automated processes like online backup and restore, and storage resource
management forced many to look at software solutions offering such
functiona-lities.
A couple of other trends also gave a major boost to the storage software
market—remarkable among them being the increasing incidence of storage
consolidation, and the resultant increasing complexity in storage
infrastructure. The free fall in storage device prices also acted as a stimulant
to drive growth for the storage software industry. It continues to do so this
year as well.
The key verticals driving demand for storage software products remained
unchanged from the previous year—it was again banks and telcos that headed the
list, with the government and BPO companies also chipping in with significant
purchases.
Buying and revenue trends: LMEs vs SMEs
The biggest instances of storage implementation took place in the three core
sectors—telecom, banking and BPO. A few petrochemicals and pharma majors also
took to storage consolidation in a big way. Implementations at Indiaoil
Corporation, Reliance and ICICI were the biggest turnkey projects during this
fiscal. And the manufacturing sector also splurged most on storage.
Despite a healthy trend among SMEs with regard to low-end network storage,
most vendors continued to focus on LMEs, trying to skim the top-end of the
market.
A few notable trends emerged in the LME segment. Slithering disk prices
inspired a few large enterprises to experiment with disk-replication—the
fastest media for recovery in the event of a disaster. Despite the low cost of
disks, replication continued to be an expensive technology to use—particularly
when done remotely across different locations.
Even though the SME segment was still evolving—with miniscule volumes in
network storage and storage software—a buoyant storage market for DR solutions
and huge volumes for DAS solutions ensured the continuing presence of SMEs on
the radar of storage vendors. Interestingly, almost all DAS shipments during the
year went straight to the SME space. Many SMEs have also looked actively at
storage consolidation and backup. Significantly, adoption of tape automation and
entry level SAN/NAS was on the rise in this market segment. And though smaller
in size, even SMEs saw their data volumes rising sharply through the year.
Consequently, entry-level capacities for storage devices saw a massive jump.
Storage technology trends
While DAS continued to dominate the Indian storage scene, the star performer
of the year was networked storage. Networked storage options performed better
than the previous year and continued to gain momentum. The share of DAS in the
enterprise storage space continued to nosedive and reached a low of 65%, with
the remaining 35% being taken by NS (IDC India estimates). As the NS market
continues to grow rapidly, IDC India predicts that by 2005, DAS and NS would
stand equal with 50% marketshare each.
The year also saw the merger of SAN and NAS, as devices featuring both block
and file handling capabilities began to arrive by the fourth quarter of the
fiscal. The net effect was increased cost efficiency and faster return on
investment for customers. Devices featuring block and file serving capabilities
debuted from HP, IBM and NetApp. The estimated market size of network storage in
India this year would be $35-40 million, grossing out at around 700 TB.
The debate between fiber channel and iSCSI as the interconnect standard for
data transport also simmered down a bit during the year. As prices continued to
fall for fiber channel-based equipment, the technology strengthened its foothold
as the de facto interconnect standard for SANs. The biggest development for
iSCSI during the year was the formal ratification of the standard in February
2003. With an official standard in place, it is expected that more products will
come out in the market in the near future.
For now, both technologies will coexist, though iSCSI is expected to find a
major market in the low-end SME market due to its integration with NAS devices.
Fiber channel will ride on its superior reliability, speed and sheer number base
to be the technology of choice for enterprise-level implementation.
In the secondary storage market, DAT continued to be the de facto standard,
whereas DLT and LTO were the two upcoming technologies. These technologies began
to gain acceptance in the Indian market as back-up needs increased
exponentially. In fact, while DAT will continue to rule the market, IDC India
expects DLT and LTO to witness increased momentum in India.
The total market for tape-based storage grew by 20%.
The tape automation market also grew riding on an increased concern for
disaster recovery and business continuity by enterprises. According to IDC
India, Year 2002-03 saw hectic activity in the low-end automation space,
including autoloaders and sub-100 slot libraries. The country also witnessed a
few high-end library incidences, and it is expected these will also find
momentum in line with low-end ones. The main drivers for high-end libraries are
the banking, finance services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom sectors, apart
from, of course, the IT industry itself.
Vendor push
In storage hardware, HP continued to be the market leader—even as it
increased its hold on the market, ending the year with a 32% share of the
overall storage hardware pie. Major installations for automated backups and SANs
helped the company achieve those figures. A centralized storage and backup
implementation for BPCL was a major highlight for HP in 2002-03.
IBM continued to be active largely in the DAS and NAS marketplace. The
company shipped 50-70 low-end NAS boxes and 15-20 high-end ones during the year.
Hero Honda, Bajaj Auto and Vysya Bank remained the company’s top customers,
with some sales also being notched up in the BPO space.
NetApps continued to bet big on unified storage (block- and file-level
access) and launched products with a direct access file system (DAFS) and iSCSI
that simulated block-based storage using file-based commands. The company had
largescale implementations in GE, ICICI and a 45-TB rollout for Texas
Instruments.
EMC continued to be focused at a niche segment with its high-end storage
devices—it implemented a SAN for AirTel for the latter’s billing and CRM
applications. Hitachi Data Systems had almost all of its sales in networked
storage during the year. Intel and i2 Technologies were two big clients for the
company that implemented India’s first SAN for a telecom major, way back in
1998.
Among software vendors, Veritas launched Adaptive Software Architecture (ASA),
a new software and services model to reduce data center complexity. As part of
its ASA, the company launched a product that unifies the management of DAS, SAN,
tape and storage infrastructure for business-critical applications. The product
was upgraded in September and features for automated storage provisioning were
added.
Legato Systems launched solutions in content management, automatic
availability and hierarchical storage management (HSM) and archival services
during the year. The company had major installations in the banking sector,
followed by telecom and BPO. Legato’s major customers during the fiscal were
Citibank, Global Trust Bank, Bharat Forge Ltd and NDMC.
Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization is about the abstraction of storage from a physical
level to a logical level using specialized virtualization software and hardware
like intelligent routers and servers. Though network-based storage evolved from
simple RAID into NAS and SAN with many successful solutions coming from major
players like EMC, HP, Sun and IBM, storage virtualization has a far higher
potential. At its best, storage virtualization can pool each and every storage
device that an enterprise has, even those spread over different geographical
locations (connected by a WAN), to form a unified virtual storage disk, with
higher levels of data integrity, redundancy and fault–tolerance thrown in for
good measure. Storage virtualization does not, however, replace SAN. Rather, it’s
an evolution of SAN that complements and adds to SAN’s efficiency and features
on a larger scale across different storage pools.
Among the routes vendors have adopted is server-based virtualization. Here
the virtualization software resides on the application server (host) and causes
the host’s OS to simulate direct communication with the storage device. In
storage-based virtualization, virtualization software resides on the storage
devices. Quite similar to host-based virtualization, it works best in uniform
environments. In network-centric virtualization, an intelligent device (like a
router) on the network takes care of the virtualization function.
The players HP, EMC, Sun, Network Appliances, IBM and Hitachi are some of the
major players in this arena who offer storage virtualization solutions. DataCore,
FalconStor, TrueSAN and LeftHand Networks are some of the other players who
offer virtualization software.
As of now, most of the benefits are yet to be translated from concepts to
reality. And some of the advantages might seem a tad over-hyped too. Complete
virtualization and true inter-vendor operability will depend on the
standardization of the different protocols involved, which will, in turn, depend
on the maturing of the market. But, initial moves towards standardization have
already been made by SNIA (Storage Network Industry Association). The Bluefin
initiative (now named SMIS or Storage Management Interface Specifications) that
was created by a consortium of leading vendors and the Storage Management
Initiative by the SNIA are right moves in this direction. The ball is now in the
vendors’ court.
Storage resource management
Virtualization cannot happen on its own, and the key driver here is storage
resource management (SRM) software. This enables virtualization by taking the
inventory of the physical assets (the number of storage devices) and digital
assets (the volume of data that resides in the devices) and prescribes various
parameters and allocation to the storage administrators in effectively managing
the storage resources. Also with the advent of storage controllers, shared
storage and virtualization has become easier.
As IT usage and automation increases, enterprises are prioritizing storage.
This is because the organization’s entire digital assets reside in the storage
infrastructure. If data has to be accessed from anywhere and at anytime, the
storage architecture a CIO is putting in place makes all the difference. As an
Aberdeen research aptly sums up, " A storage infrastructure has to
fundamentally do three things—store data, move data where needed and make the
previous two manageable. Probably the biggest challenge a CIO has to deal with
is managing these three effectively and arriving at a storage management
infrastructure!
Shared storage
In simple terms, shared storage is nothing but sharing of contents between
multiple client entities by putting in place a combination of technologies at
work—like NAS, SAN, tape, virtualization etc. The idea behind a shared storage
is to consolidate the gamut of data that runs through the enterprise. For
instance in a robust data-sharing environment, users will be able to share data
irrespective of the platform on which it runs. For example a Windows application
can be shared with a user running UNIX. This seamless integration is the major
advantage of shared storage. Lets sample another scenario—when an enterprise
with a typical DAS architecture has a large number of RAIDS (Redundant Array of
Independent Disks), by consolidation, the number of RAID systems can be narrowed
down to two or three units. The return on this kind of RAID revamp will be the
drastic increase in the per user storage allocation which is between ten to 15
times after consolidation.
Networked storage and SMEs
As networked storage grows rapidly in the Indian marketplace, and gain
acceptability among Indian enterprises, the SMEs are still reluctant to take the
bait. Most of the SMEs are still limited to DAS (direct attached storage), and
are reluctant to migrate to even NAS, forget SAN. The principal reason behind
this reticence is plain economics, the perceived notion that SAN is an expensive
proposition especially for an Indian SME kind of set up. The perception remains
that adding an NT server is cheaper option than having a NAS or an entry-level
SAN.
According to Gartner estimates, SAN would account for 49% of the storage
revenue pie in India this fiscal, but the SMEs contribution towards this would
be negligible. And one big factor that hinders SMEs march to adopting SANs is
the ubiquitous complexity in setting up a SAN solution.
There is no single, open standard as yet for interoperability between SAN
management products from different vendors. They can be set up in myriad
permutations, and include many connections among host bus adapters, switches,
RAID disks and SCSI or Fibre Channel disk arrays that enable storage solutions
on multiple platforms and operating systems. Add to this, a huge installed base
of proprietary components, and SANs become somewhat of a nightmare to manage.
Coupled with this, the majority of SAN management software, with the
exception of the data management sector, is still tied to specific hardware
products. The lack of interoperable and hardware-diagnostic standards has made
it difficult for vendors to present a truly heterogeneous software solution,
even if they wanted to. This makes it doubly difficult for IT managers with SMEs
to look for SAN deployment, as they are already constrained by lack of quality
skilled manpower.
Despite the lack of SAN penetration into SMEs till now, the picture is
getting brighter. This coincides, more with SMEs too facing a large influx of
mission-critical data. And the storage vendors too are coming up with offerings
that bring down the costs and reduce the deployment complexity of the colution.
IBM’s "SAN Made Simple" offering is priced at Rs 9 lakh and can be
implemented in quick time—total cycles from beginning to functionality are as
little as three to four days.
SANs are now being used for local area network-free backups. A typical SAN
solution can be deployed from 1 TB data onwards, with 10 servers. The increased
implementation of high availability enterprise level applications such as ERP,
CRM and data warehousing software even across SMEs has contributed to the
growing storage market in India. These applications involve tremendous data
analysis and distribution, all of which require storage.
In addition, SAN is finding its niche in storage consolidation or business
continuity solutions amongst SMEs. For years organizations have been using
server-attached storage, server hard disks and tapes. This makes data sharing
complicated and backups difficult to administer. Storage consolidation offers
flexible and centrally managed storage that can be distributed to provide the
performance and availability demanded by applications. It lets organisations
manage growth, control security and information access, and provide rapid
response to changing business demands.
The onward march
The good news in FY 2002-03 was that all the efforts, time and money spent
in educating businesses about the value of their own business data seemed to pay
off. Despite the general economic slowdown, businesses finally began to perceive
sound data storage infrastructure as something more than an extravagance and an
actual business necessity. This fact was best demonstrated in the manufacturing
sector’s rush for storage consolidation.
Though the storage market seems to have attained a preliminary level of
maturity in the country, there’s still a long way to go before the market
achieves its full potential. The biggest promise for storage vendors continue to
be the SME segment, which is just starting to wake up to the business advantages
of a sound storage plan. Though the bread and butter for storage companies will
continue to come from the core segments—banking and finance, telcos, BPO and
government—if the SME market blossoms, the picture next year should be even
rosier.
RISHI SETH
| 
Special Issues 
