Dataquest : Taming Data

Deploying IT, aligning it with the organizations business goals, and creating a scalable architecture is a fundamental yet significant challenge facing todays CIOs. A successful IT backbone is a judicious blend of apps and hardware that create an infrastructure to be used by thousands of users. If we look at the key components of an IT infrastructure, storage is the vital link that secures the data, and an enterprises digital assets reside on a plethora of storage topologies and devices. A testimony of the booming storage market, led by the networking boom, is the increasing focus vendors give to storage. Today, storage has become a separate business entity and is clearly separated from servers. The growth is driven by the explosion of dataestimated to be growing at about 60% annually. Markets like India, where digitization is higher, with organizations going on an aggressive automation and expansion drive, are creating huge demand for storage.

According to a report by IDC, The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010, information will grow at a CAGR of 57% between 2006 and 2010 to reach 988 exabytes. And Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, will grow by 30-40% faster. What this growth means is that it is equivalent to approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written. As per the report, organizations, including businesses of all size, agencies, governments, and associations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85% of the information. What makes the situation more complex and somewhat uncontrollable is the nature of the digital information generated. Over 95% of the digital information consists of unstructured data. Hence, managing storage and giving a structure to unstructured data will be the key growth driver.

Reflecting on this, Manoj Chugh, president, EMC, India and SAARC, says, The information deluge is making it imperative for organizations to redesign their IT strategy, putting information at center stage. The problem is that todays IT infrastructures are not designed to deal with new challengessecurity and privacy to the need to store, manage, protect, leverage, and retrieve critical information. Chugh also says that IT infrastructures are stressed because of an avalanche of information, most of it coming from completely new sources and in completely new forms like images, voice, and video. The new digital information tends to replicate itself uncontrollably and is not subject to traditional best-practices of the data center.

Shailesh Agarwal, country manager, Storage, IBM India, says, The enterprise spend on storage is increasing in India year-on-year. Segments like banking, telecom, digital media, surveillance, and a host of others are driving the need for more storage. More and more data storage means that what is stored has to be intelligently managed. With rapid networking, enterprises need to give round the clock access to its apps and data, and for that a well-managed storage management strategy is a must.

Storage Challenges
Since IT budgets have become largely flat, the toughest challenge faced by CIOs is to architect and manage the right storage infrastructure at a reduced budget, which address the data and information growth. Additionally, there are challenges in managing and protecting the data efficiently. Considering the need for content of various forms to be managed effectively, storage has become a big issue because of which organizations need to look at solutions like enterprise content management (ECM) and archiving.

New regulations and compliance (IT Act, SOX, Clause 49, HIPPA) that organizations are bound to adhere to are becoming the in-thing. This will in turn force enterprises to adopt concepts like content addressed storage (CAS). Email management is also considered as a significant challenge with CIOs needing to create a robust email management system. Rajendra Dhavale, director, Technical Sales, CA India, says, Information governance is indeed a key part of our storage strategy. Archival of email is critical and is required by various regulations. Moreover, other forms of communication like instant IM chat need to be intelligently archived.


Consolidation and virtualization are two technologies that characterize every IT deployment, and most of our customers insist on it Shailesh Agarwal country manager, Storage, IBM India/South Asia	Large and medium sized businesses are now treating storage as a separate entity from servers, and have realized the merits of network storage Vishal Dhupar MD, Symantec India & SAARC	We see a great boost in the mid-size market, resulting in high growth for midrange SAN deployments L Sivashankaran, director, Storage, Sun Microsystems India	Information governance is a key part of our strategy. Archival of email is required by various regulations Rajendra Dhavale, director, technical sales CA India

As we look beyond data, disaster recovery and business continuity has become an important issue. Creating a DR site that ushers in 100% data security is a big challenge. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, DR tops the IT agenda of the CIOs. Careful planning in selecting the DR site and putting in place effective and secure back up from a primary to secondary site will set the stage of seamless business continuity. Close on the heels of DR is another big challenge of managing data security. Says Chugh, Assuring data confidentiality and integrity have become major security challenges. Customers not only want to avoid the financial implications of data loss and the potential negative publicity, they are also challenged by information-specific compliance requirements imposed by the industry and government regulations.

Prakash Krishnamoorthy, business manager, Mid-range Products, Storage Works Division, HP India Sales, says, When we talk storage, its much more than just capacity. It is about effectively protecting data, providing business continuity, and creating a secure environment. Data is increasingly becoming structured and that is driving the market. But, any storage infrastructure will have a mix of SAN and NAS, with business apps driving SAN and files making for NAS.


Growing amounts of data from all areas of an organization, coupled with the need to support a non-stop business model and ever smaller recovery timeframes make data protection even more challenging Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director, Network Appliance	NAS and SAN have specific strengths and are used for defined purposes. The adoption of these technologies is dependent on the business requirements, and cost and value acquired through them Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC	When we talk of storage its much more than just capacity. It is about effectively protecting data, providing business continuity and creating a secure environment Prakash Krishnamoorthy, business manager, mid-range products, storage works division, HP India Sales

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.

Manoj Chugh, EMC suggests a three phase
ILM implementation strategy
for any customer, regardless of their size

Phase 1

Deploy tiered networked storage
Form basis for any policy-based information management
Exploit value manually or with automation

Phase 2

Apply ILM strategies, processes, and technologies to a specific application
Link the data classification to business policies
Automate the execution of those policies
Results include better management and optimal allocation of storage resources

Phase 3

Goal is to automate more of the front-end or classification and policy management activities
Scale to a wider set of enterprise applications

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.

Top 5 ILM best practices

Any successful ILM strategy has to be:
Business-centric: Mesh closely with key processes, applications, and initiatives of the business concerned
Policy-based: Well anchored in enterprise-wide information management policies that span all processes, applications, and resources
Centrally Managed: By providing an integrated view into all information assets of the business, both structured and unstructured
Heterogeneous: It must encompass all types of platforms and operating systems
Aligned with the Value of Data: Matching storage resources to the value of the data to the business at any given point in time

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.

Soumitra Agarwal of Network Appliance talks about some
post-SAN deployment challenges

Storage Provisioning: The storage administrator needs to balance performance with capacity for each application as storage utilization and demands keep changing Workload Prioritization: All applications on the storage network contend for the same storage resources. However, all applications are not equally critical Backup and Recovery: Back-up and recovery is a complex process in traditional SAN solutions
Application Integration: Most SAN solutions provide advanced data protection capability. However, to leverage them effectively in a production environment, it is important to integrate those features with the application. This can be achieved through specialized tools or through extensive scripting and professional services which might work out to be more expensive and time consuming
Data Migration: This is the critical piece between SAN implementation and putting the system into production. All legacy data from DAS systems need to be migrated to the SAN system

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