Enterprise storage in India is still largely direct-attached or server-based, but networked storage is growing rapidly. NAS and SAN are getting faster, and these storage options have gained acceptability among Indian enterprises, though 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.

Roadblocks for SMEs
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. However, Anil Valluri of Sun Microsystems feels ii is high time this myth is dispelled. "Networked storage is not strictly an ‘enterprise-only’ concept. Unfortunately the perception is that it is cheaper to add NT servers, than to put in a NAS or entry-level SAN for that matter. However, companies doing this risk facing a storage management nightmare." With entry-level NAS products shipping for a few lakh and even SAN coming in for less than a million rupees, it is time for SMEs to take note and plan their storage accordingly.

According to Gartner estimates, SAN would account for 49 percent of the storage revenue pie in India this year, but the SMEs contribution towards this would be negligible. Anal Jain, country manager, Net Apps believes that not only costs, even the complexity involved in a SAN deployment and management is a big hindrance for SMEs towards a large scale migration.

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, are still tied to specific hardware products. The lack of interoperable and hardware-diagnostic standards have 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.

Increasing adoption
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. For example, IBM’s "SAN made Simple" offering is priced at Rs 9 lakhs and can be implemented in three to four days. According to Vaidyanathan Iyer, country manager, Apara Networks, one of the country’s largest SI for storage, SAN reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) factor. "SANs significantly reduce TCO.

The reduction of TCO very rapidly throws up very good RoI around SAN deployment. No wonder organisations invest on SAN deployment even in periods of economic slowdowns because SAN directly helps them save money," says Iyer.

In fact, some players like Quantum and Legato even feel that the market is right now ripe for targeting SMEs with SAN solutions. With SMEs having more than 10GB of data that need protection, SANs are bound to be increasingly accepted. IBM is also helping its SME customers accelerate the adoption of SAN in their computing infrastructure and how their storage needs can be met with these solutions. With RBI and SEBI guidelines making policy-based backups mandatory for banks and financial institutions, more and more SMEs in the BFSI vertical are adopting SANs.

Advantage SAN
What are the other advantages of SANs for the SMEs? SANs provide a storage infrastructure that support server clustering or multi-server data access for databases and transaction systems in a campus environment. They are also being used for local area network-free backups. SAN solutions can be deployed starting from data of 1 TB 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.

If the Word SAN is synonymous with expensive and complex for SMEs, there may be some good news in the offing. IP SANs attempt to solve all that and give a fresh lease of life to an enterprise’s existing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hardware. Industry experts expect to see IP SANs in action in the coming year. Fibre channel SANs will continue to be the best option for pure performance, but they will be superseded by IP SANs in a multitude of applications that are not so mission-critical.

In addition, SAN is finding its niche in storage consolidation or business continuity solutions amongst SMEs. For years organisations have been using server-attached storage, server hard disks and tapes. This makes data sharing complicated and backups difficult to administer. It is high time that they consolidate their storage be it tape libraries, SAN or NAS, to a central location. 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.

Rajneesh De
(Voice & Data)