Storage Special by ctof magazine

S P I N E

CTO FORUM

Technology for Growth and Governance

STORAGE SPECIAL Volume 05 | Issue 13

A 9.9 Media Publication

February | 21 | 2010 | Rs.50 Volume 05 | Issue 13

EDITORIAL RAHUL NEEL MANI | rahul.mani@9dot9.in

Use Storage Smartly: CIOs must be

involved in business planning to create smart storage architectures for the future

he days of blindly adding disk space to meet the increasing demand for critical business data are over. The new order requires CIOs to first consider the full storage environment including data availability, resource utilisation, data security, disaster recovery, environmental concerns and then plan their architecture. To do this effectively, CIOs must understand the business needs behind requests for storage. IT teams need to collabo-

EDITOR’S PICK 23

rate with business users and identify what they need to store, archive and retrieve. Where should a CIO begin? The first step is to determine the value of the data that is necessary for making informed business decisions. In my view, only primary data needs to be ‘data in motion’; the rest can reside on inexpensive storage devices or just be discarded. This analysis cannot be done using tools. Human expertise is critical to ensure that storage

What About the Elephant in the Room? Robert Presley, former IT Director, GameStop says he loves virtualisation but CIOs have lost their way and are now putting a band-aid on the real problem.

systems are used smartly; and therefore IT teams need to be involved in the classification process. Apart from technology-related issues, environmental and regulatory factors must be kept in mind while architecting the storage infrastructure for the enterprises of the future. This is a significant shift from the past and CIOs need to assess and design their storage systems visa-vis the evolving environmental and legal framework. How are CIOs coping? While there are several different approaches, the answer often lies in a blend of smarter technologies and better strategic planning. In this year’s Storage Special, we analyse the most popular enterprise storage trends together with an assessment of their acceptability and adop-

tion amongst enterprises. Our research and analysis suggests that CIOs who are in sync with the business needs of their enterprise are the ones who manage to use storage efficiently. Their solutions enable the enterprise to grow quicker, stay nimble, and do more with less. We are committed to highlighting best practices amongst industry leaders and hope that you will find value in the features and our cover story. As always, I look forward to your feedback.

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

VOLUMN 05 | ISSUE 13

FEBRUARY 10 THECTOFORUM.COM

COV E R D E S I G N: AN I L T

CONTE NTS

18 COVER STORY

18 | Make It Small CIOs want

COLUMN

43 | NO HOLDS BARRED: RESEARCH IN ACTION Russ Owen, President of CSC Managed Services Portfolio shares his company's vision on innovation.

storage to occupy less space in the data centre and take less time to manage. New developments in storage technology are making that possible.

BY SANA KHAN

48 | VIEW POINT: AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-IN To avoid any service related issues, it is essential for customers to deal carefully with their software vendors. BY BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI

FEATURES COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o K.P.T House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. TTC Ind. Area, Plot No. A-403, MIDC Mahape, Navi Mumbai 400709

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

39 | BY INVITATION: FUTURE OF STORAGE INDUSTRY: Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to worry CIOs.

VOLUME 05 | ISSUE 13 | 21 FEBRUARY 2010

www.thectoforum.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur EDITORIAL Editor: Rahul Neel Mani Resident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra Sr. Assistant Editor: Gyana Ranjan Swain Assistant Editor: Aditya Kelekar Consulting Editor: Shubhendu Parth Principal Correspondent: Vinita Gupta Correspondent: Sana Khan DESIGN Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK Manager Design: Chander Shekhar Sr. Visualisers: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR & Anil T Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

12 A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

12 |Stop Walking in the Dark “CIOs

need to adopt a proactive approach to Information Technology management," says Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software 15

15 | NEXT HORIZONS: THE ART OF THE DEAL Lessons in successful vendor negotiations.

46 | LITTLE GIANTS: IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT How an effective fleet management system helped Carzonrent in reducing their turnaround time.

REGULARS

01 | EDITORIAL 06 | ENTERPRISE ROUNDUP 42 | BOOK REVIEW

advertisers’ index IBM REVERSE GATEFOLD VMWare IFC SCM Conclave 10-11 Meganet 41 Western Digital BC This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

ADVISORY PANEL Ajay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limired Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej Industries Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Vijay Mehra, Executive VP, Global Head-Industry Verticals, Patni SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand Singh National Manager Online Sales: Nitin Walia National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) Product Manager – Rachit Kinger Asst. Brand Manager: Arpita Ganguli Co-ordinator-MIS & Scheduling: Aatish Mohite Bangalore & Chennai: Vinodh K (09740714817) Delhi: Pranav Saran (09312685289) Kolkata: Jayanta Bhattacharya (09331829284) Mumbai: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755) PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh OFFICE ADDRESS Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd C/o K.P.T House,Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd C/o K.P.T House, Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur C/o K.P.T House, Plot 41/13, Sector-30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai-400703 India Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D 107,TTC Industrial Area, Nerul.Navi Mumbai 400 706

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

LETTERS CTOForum LinkedIn Group Join more than 200 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn group for latest news and hot enterprise technology discussions. Share your thoughts, participate in discussions and win prizes for the most valuable contribution. You can join The CTOForum group at: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2580450

Some of the hot discussions on the group are:

PULL UP YOUR SOCKS The ever increasing demand for storage appears to be outpacing the ever reducing cost of storage at an alarming rate. While this is good for storage suppliers, it is a daunting task for the enterprise IT leaders to pull together strategies that take advantage of data de-duplication, data management, virtualisation and every other trick in the book to ensure that storage demands can be effectively managed. DAVID BRISKMAN, CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories

Will the IT Amendment Act that requires corporates to protect personal information on computers have an impact on enterprises' security practices? The passage of amendments to the IT Act 2000, which came into effect from October, 2009 has made substantial difference in the requirements from Indian industry. First, the cyber law and its amendments need to be carefully studied and understood by corporate personnel in-charge of compliance. Secondly, there are more steps to followup. The Indian Cyber Laws are in the right direction.

—Malick Mohamed, Centre Manager at Ikas Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

IT TRANSFORMATION I was delighted to receive the Feb 07 issue of CTO Forum. It not only clarified a lot of issues on IT transformation process but also showed the way to go. I would like to share my personal experiences with my peers in the industry. The Calendar with the issue was a refreshing change. Keep up the good work. K.VASANTHA KUMAR, IT Head, Linea Fashions India Private Limited

“The new CTO Forum with its refreshing design and layout and coverage of contemporary issues is extremly satisfactory. I read the magazine regularly and will look forward to contribute in the future.”

Which role will die - the CIO or the CTO?

"I would say both will co-exist. This is purely based on the organisational needs and business model. Example: If the organisation is headed towards automation and prioritise internal needs, that might give birth to the role of a CIO if it does not exist. If the organisation is headed towards external focus and product delivery, the CTO role will be crucial." —Raj DN, Head of Database Operations, Sify Technologies Ltd.

CTOF Connect

Govind Rammurthy, MD and CEO, eScan says banks in India need to instill confidence amongst users when it comes to online banking. He talks to Ashwani Mishra on the areas of concern in the online banking space and other emerging security threats. Excerpts from the interview. To read the full story go to:

thectoforum.com/ content/stopignoring-basicnorms

OPINION

BEYOND THE BASICS

A CIO has to make an impact and deliver significant value to business.

AJAY DHIR, Group CIO, JSL Limited.

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.

“I believe that just speaking the right language or applying known formulae is not enough to get the CIO home. As a CIO, we have to get around to some basics.” To read the full story go to:

Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to editor@thectoforum.com

thectoforum.com/resources/opinions S.R. BALA, Exec VP IT Godfrey Philips.

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

STORY INSIDE

Enterprise

Sify, in partnership with HDS, has launched on-demand storage services Pg 9

ROUND-UP

Encouraging Signs of a Turnaround in Storage Systems Market. iSCSI SAN market shows promising growth. WORLDWIDE external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a 10.0% decline year over year, totalling $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 2,661 petabytes, growing 21% year over year. EMC maintained its lead in the market with 24.2% revenue share in the third quarter, followed by IBM with 13.2% share. HP ended in the third position with 11.8% market share. Network Disk Storage Systems: The total network disk storage market (NAS

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) declined 7.6% year over year in the Q3 to $3.4 billion in revenues. Open SAN market which declined 16%, EMC maintained its lead with 24.4% share. The NAS market grew 2.2% YOY, led by EMC with 46.4% revenue share and followed by NetApp with 24.5% share. The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 24.7% revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 33.6% revenue share, followed by EMC with 15.1%. Source: IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, December 3, 2009.

1.35

DATA BRIEFING

billion

Forecasted market for virtualisation and related services in 2010: Springboard Research

E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP

THEY STEVE SAID IT DUPLESSIE There is a lot of buzz about cloud computing. It is tipped as the new wave in computing which will ultimately replace the private IT infrastructure and mammoth data centres that enterprises today put together. But Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group and the guru of storage and enterprise systems thinks otherwise. This is what he says about cloud:

IBM Unveils Clustered NAS Storage. SONAS products can scale in both capacity and performance. IBM has announced its entry in the growing market for clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems. IBM said its new ‘Scale Out Network Attached Storage’ (SONAS) products can scale both capacity and performance while providing parallel access to data and a global name space that can manage billions of files and up to 14.4 petabytes of capacity. The new offering is a hardware-based expansion of its ‘Scale Out File Services’ and is based on the General Parallel File System (GPFS). The Samba-based systems include management nodes, switches, interface nodes, data storage nodes, RAID controllers and expansion units, and offer snapshot capabilities, tiered storage and HSM through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). The NAS systems include Gigabit Ethernet, 10Gigabit Ethernet and 20Gbps InfiniBand connections, and users can combine up to 30 interface nodes and 30 240-drive storage pods to reach 7.2PB with 1TB drives and 14.4PB with 2TB drives, which will be coming in April, a month after general availability. IBM is currently testing applications with SONAS, including Symantec and IBM Tivoli backup, VMware ESX and Oracle RAC.

QUICK BYTE ON SCALE-OUT NAS

“The ‘Cloud’ market is not a market – it’s a construct. The SSP market 10 years ago wasn’t a market either – it was a bad idea. Both had absurd levels of ‘buzz’ which led to absurd levels of VC money being poured in. Both will end the same way – with disillusionment.” —Steve Duplessie

Scale-out NAS (Network Attached Storage) not only meets rich media performance requirements, it does so cost effectively. It reduces power consumption relative to scale-up systems since processors typically use 95% less power than that consumed by an additional disk shelf. CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP

How does a ‘multi-tiered’ data centre help in reducing costs? Businesses today operate on an assumption that more availability is always better. As a result, they build the entire data centre based on the highest availability required by critical applications. They invest in expensive, unnecessary and redundant infrastructure along with specialised mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. A ‘multi-tiered’ approach to building data centres can increase efficiency and reduce capital costs by up to 25 percent. By 2013 about 70 percent of the data centre will use multi-tiered data centre approach. By using a multi-tiered data centre, customers would save millions of dollars while at the same time help make the data center scalable and more efficient.

Multi-tiered data centres are cost effective. Traditional approach of building data centres is unsustainable and increases capitals costs.

RICHARD EINHORN, Director, Business Development and Strategy at HP spoke to Vinita Gupta about data centre trends in 2010 and what HP has to offer in this space. Excerpts:

Could you cite an example of a company where HP has helped transform the data centre experience? HP has helped many companies globally in transforming their data centre experience. A recent example is Citibank. We delivered a cost-effective, well-engineered data centre

that meets the highest criteria of environmental sustainability. In just four years, Citibank reduced its data centre footprint globally from 52 to 24. Besides this, we did a few smaller innovations in designs that allowed Citibank to save additional costs. In Citibank’s Georgetown data centre, for example, concreteencased cooling towers can withstand winds of up to 175 mph, and landscaping with native plantings uses 50 percent less water than conventionally designed grounds.

GLOBAL TRACKER

60.8%

AFCOM 2009-10 data centre trends survey and analysis conducted with 436 data

centre sites reveal that the most important results they have experienced as a result of implementing green measures are: 8

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

51.4%

Power Efficiency

Cooling Efficiency SOURCE: AFCOM SURVEY 2009,

Tell us about HP’s mobile data centre.. HP’s mobile data centre is called POD (performance-optimised data centre) in which the data centre is present in a shipping container and hence it can be transported anywhere. The HP POD provides the critical infrastructure components required to run a wide range of compute, storage and application functions. It requires about 20 % less capital expenditure than traditional brick and mortar data centres and is 50 % more energy efficient than typical data centre build-outs, reducing energy cost and carbon emissions. SMEs who don’t want to make large investments but need high availability will use this product. It is also ideal for spaceconstrained companies looking to add capacity to their existing data centres. What will be the key data centre trends in 2010? The traditional approach of building data centres is unsustainable. One of the clear trends we see is the adoption of multi-tiered approach. A growing concern is that of high power costs and cooling capacities. Designing a data centre which is energy efficient will become a priority. HP CFS can help companies save up to $300,000 by just making small changes in design without much investment. For instance, you can increase the UPS room temperature set point or shutdown 3 CRAC units.

E NTE RPRI SE ROUND -UP

On-demand Storage. Powered by HDS, this will help CIOs to align IT with business. Pradip J. Nath (left), Executive President at Sify, with Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems at the launch of Sify's on-demand storage service.

SIFY Technologies recently announced the launch of its SLA (service level agreement) driven, utility-based ‘On-Demand’ storage service to manage the complete lifecycle of enterprise information - from its creation to the final disposal. The fully managed, util-

ity based, ‘On-Demand’, scalable storage platform is powered by Hitachi Data Systems. Pradip J. Nath, Executive President at Sify said, "The launch of our On-Demand Storage platform is a significant step towards Sify's journey towards building India's

best Cloud Infrastructure. Sify's integrated data centre, network, enterprise applications and professional support, gives us the edge in offering ‘On-Demand’ ‘Cloud Infrastructure' for companies seeking dynamic scalability, business agility, high-availability and enterprise security across compute, storage, security and network platforms while reducing costs." "Sify's ‘On-Demand’ Storage service powered by Hitachi Data Systems solutions is certain to benefit CIOs who are tasked with aligning IT objectives to business needs. The enterprises are moving towards service delivery model as it is cost effective and highly reliable. The unstructured data is very active but it stale quickly and hence such data can be moved to lower tiers,” said Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems. The service also offers the industry leading availability guarantee of 99.99% on the storage system to meet specific application and business uptime requirements. Sify’s four data centres are currently operational and by October 2010 its fifth data centre (around 130,000 sq. feet) in the National Capital Region will be ready. —By Vinita Gupta

FACT TICKER

2010 Will Be the Year for Cost Effective Storage. Will influence purchasing decisions.

PERMABIT Technology Corporation has outlined a series of predictions for the data storage industry in 2010. It sees a “New Normal” occurring in the storage market which is driven by the need for more cost effective purchase

and deployment of storage across multiple tiers. Dedupe Comes of Age — Driven by cost reduction and tight IT budgets, along with the broad acceptance and technology readiness; deduplication will become a

requirement for all storage purchases — NAS and block level storage. Primary Consideration — Driven by the undeniable economics of data reduction, deduplication will be increasingly deployed in primary data stores. Virtual Bloat is Solved — Dedupe will be deployed across all storage tiers, solving the problem of redundant images and storage bloat. Getting Cloudy — Cloud

storage will make inroads in enterprise private cloud deployments along with public clouds for consumer and the SMEs. RAID continues to decline — Driven by the realisation that RAID does not provide the scalability necessary to adequately protect today’s data stores, it will continue to atrophy as a data protection methodology. Source: www.permabit. com/pressreleases

STORAGE SECURITY

rganisations today store all sorts of information in electronic format. Much of this is about the business itself, some is personal about employees, clients and associates, and some is more general. Depending on several factors, some of this information may be subject to government or industry regulations; some of it may even be classified that impacts national security. While protecting the data’s integrity and confidentiality is always desirable, in many cases it is mandatory, and failure to comply may subject the company to various charges. Why, then, do companies fail to properly secure data? It is important to assess and classify data according to its sensitivity and protect it accordingly. Strong security is warranted for certain types of data. Examples include: Trade secrets that would put the organisation at a disadvantage Business financial information details Personal information, such as employees’ or customers’ addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth, salaries, etc. (unless required) Client/customer information that could be used by competitors Details pertaining to lawsuits and other legal matters This is only a sampling; you may have other types of data that need to be protected. —Source: www.windowssecurity.com

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

C H I P S A LYA R D S

Stop Walking CHIP SALYARDS | BMC SOFTWARE

in the Dark

Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific of BMC Software in a conversation with Vinita Gupta speaks about the importance of Business Services Management and BMC’s plans to augment its portfolio in India.

Business Service Management (BSM) is described as the ability to see and use technology infrastructure from a business perspective rather than just capability tools. How would you expand on this basic definition from a CIO’s perspective? In any IT environment, incidents are an everyday affair. Even in organisations where IT is at a high maturity level, these are common. They happen in many degrees of severity, but no matter how minor, incidents can impact business through sever service disruptions if they are not quickly intercepted and resolved. CIOs have now realised the need for a proactive approach to IT management and thus are adopting bestpractices frameworks, such as the IT

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

Infrastructure Library (ITIL). IT is making significant progress in anticipating and meeting the needs of the business, becoming more integrated with business in the process. Business Service Management (BSM) is concerned with IT Service Management, helping organisations monitor IT infrastructure and services from a business perspective. BSM offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organisations cut cost, reduce risk, and increase profitability. BSM ensures that IT adds value to the business and doesn’t exist just as a cost centre. According to CIOs, BSM tools solve only an isolated part of their planning and management puzzle, and thus they fail

to address business and IT complexities. How would you counter this argument? In today's environment, CIOs have to do more with existing assets and make sure new IT investments are beneficial. Managing various parameters of the IT environment efficiently and effectively are essential steps in doing that, because without proper management and visibility, you may find yourself walking in the dark. Many customers and, more specifically, CIOs I personally speak to, recognise this. Is there any example (global or India-specific) that comes to your mind when it comes to implementing business service management?

A GOOD MARKET: Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software says his company has bagged 22 new clients in India in recent times

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

C H I P S A LYA R D S

Tata Motors Limited (TML), one of India’s largest automobile companies, adopted BMC’s Remedy IT Service Management Suite to establish a baseline of the IT application and infrastructure landscape across all technology pillars. BMC applications served as the software framework for managing the interactions and process relationships among all the support groups managing the IT infrastructure underlying business services. BSM tools also played a key role in the rollout of Tata’s ambitious small car ‘Nano’ by helping to track and control all components of IT services and automating the management of the IT infrastructure, which was vital to the designing and planning of the plants that manufactured Nano as well as running day-to-day business processes. IT helped the company shrink its design cycle time. BMC recently launched the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite ‘On Demand’ solution. How will it help enterprises in adding new IT services and expedite the restoration of service in case of an incident? BMC is applying next-generation technology along with best practices to help organisations achieve proactive IT operations quickly and cost effectively. With products such as BMC Event and Impact Management and BladeLogic Server Automation, Network Automation and Client Automation, we will provide an integrated solution that helps organisations simplify, predict and automate IT. Early this year, CA bought Oblicore, a company whose software helps users monitor and manage their service level agreements across their IT infrastructures. Analysts see CA making a very clever acquisition with Oblicore; one that puts them a step ahead of their competition in cloud management and BSM. How do you view it?

“BMC has designed its products from the beginning to work across disparate environments.”

CA customers are now going to be challenged with both service-level reporting and service catalog functionality from disparate products that are each built upon different architectures. This is an inherent flaw with the CA strategy of ‘design by acquisition’. In comparison, BMC's strategy is ‘design from the ground up’ for BSM as well as for cloud computing. BMC pioneered the concept of BSM and has designed its products from the very beginning to work across disparate environments. For example, BMC’s SLM product provides customers the ability to track, measure and manage service levels in real time in an on-premise, virtual or cloud environments. BMC is focused on helping organisations evolve from the classic onpremise IT infrastructure to virtualized datacenters, then to private cloud environments and ultimately hybrid clouds, which combine private clouds and public cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

THINGS I BELIEVE IN That there is a need for proactive approach to IT management and thus adopting a best-practices framework makes sense That a service-oriented organisational structure is the order of the day

What are the recent client wins and future plans of BMC Software? BMC Software has grown over 30 percent in the Indian market and has bagged around 22 new clients. This growth is due to the increase in the adoption of BSM services by Indian enterprises to solve complex IT problems. BMC APAC derives 20 percent of its revenues from BMC India. BMC currently has more than 50 satisfied customers in India. Our clientele includes giants such as IDEA Cellular, Bharti-Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Tata Communications, Tata Motors, Reliance Communications, and Sahara. Some of the major deals for BMC in 2009 were: HCL – Xerox, TCL, platform deals at Wipro, TCS, Nokia, Siemens Network, BSNL, Tata Communications and Indus Technologies.

—vinita.gupta@9dot9.in

HORIZONS

FEATURES INSIDE

The Emergence of 'Fraud as a Service' The underworld has drafted well-defined SLAs to keep fraud customers happy Pg 16

N ILLUSTRATION : SANTOSH KUSHWAHA

egotiating is part of life. If you don't believe that then you've never had kids, a job, siblings, nor parents for that matter. My son understands negotiation. At three years of age he is already trying to negotiate the best deal —tell him he can only have one of anything and he quickly moves to his primary negotiating tactic of "I want three." We sometimes settle at two, other times he loses that second in favour of an alternative—a song, a story, or maybe just some of my time during a busy day. Does he win? Yes, but only sort of. Winning while giving the perception of losing is a fine art—one that the best CXOs understand very well.

Vendor strength - The great lie

The Art of the Deal Lessons in Successful Vendor Negotiation.

BY THOMAS STRUAN

Without getting into the various scenarios that can impede or complicate negotiations, it is safe to assume that most vendors tend to approach any new deal from the standpoint of being in the driver's seat. This is even more true when you contact them for information about their product or service. No matter what the situation is, these lessons can help you shift the balance of power in any negotiation to your favour.

LESSON 1 Know when to hold 'em The vendor wants a sweet deal, you've been placed on a short leash in terms of spend-

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

NEXT HORIZONS

O RGAN I SE D FR AU D

ing, and you need to get the product/service/ upgrade plan in place before year end (all cards that you play very close to your vest). Lesson 1 in the art of the deal — never, and I mean NEVER, put all your cards on the table. This is important because the only tool you have in negotiating with a vendor is knowledge — knowledge about your company, time table, budget, etc... Deciding when to divulge your knowledge is critical. My favourite tactic is to figure out how much stall time I have before I need to present a decision and then using as much of it as possible. Making them wait is often a key to ultimate success, but you cannot let them know when you need to make a decision — NEVER PLAY YOUR CARDS UP FRONT!

LESSON 2 Them that have the gold Them that have the gold make the rules!!! In negotiating you always have to figure out what the gold is and who has more of it. In many cases it is, pure and simple, CASH! For the vendor their gold is the services they perform or products they deliver. They put a value on their treasure and it is up to you as the negotiator to help them see that they need to surrender some of it. If this sounds like war that's because it is. Some wars are fought till the defeat of your enemy, others are fought over turf. My strategy is to always

(and I mean always) play down the other side's hand even when they call your bluff. Also, you should try to keep other options open so that, even if you end up paying a little more now, you can come back later and renegotiate with the same set of vendors.

LESSON 3 Go to the mattresses In Godfather parlance this means getting ready to do battle. Negotiation means you have to study who you are up against. A common mistake is to invite a vendor in to speak with you without studying them in advance. When you are thinking of buying a new car you do some research and try to find the best deal. Well, vendor negotiation is very much the same. Don't be afraid to ask to speak to references beforehand — and tell them you will be wary of any reference that is too glowing. Part of Going to the Mattresses is respectfully undercutting the quote to a somewhat ridiculous level (if you ever get to that point with a vendor). Some might say that this is insulting, but there is nothing insulting about cold hard cash.

LESSON 4 Playing hard to get It is alright to play hard to get, so long as you understand that at some point you will want to dance with someone. You cannot

let your emotions get carried away and never under any circumstance get to a point of feeling sorry for a vendor or their representative — this is business and if you allow emotion to sway you then you can kill your own career in a hurry. That doesn't mean that you don't want to develop a relationship. Like I said, eventually you want to dance with someone, but keep in mind that the vendor is going to be looking after his bottom line so you had better be looking after yours.

Le coup de grace Once you are at the point of signing on the dotted line you cannot forget that this is but one battle in a never ending war. Now, don't get the impression that your relationship with the vendor needs to be venomous. On the contrary, you need to develop a keen relationship with your vendor representatives and people in your vendor's back office. It is these relationships, often built during hard fought negotiations, that will largely determine the success of a partnership. Much respect can be earned for being a tough but fair negotiator. At the end of the day you need to be able to work with those you have contracted with. —Thomas Struan is Principal and Senior Consultant at Thomas Struan Consulting. Thomas is also a Technology Advisor at Infotraxx Systems.

The Emergence of Fraud as a Service

Are you aware that your competitor may be using FaaS to dethrone you? BY MIKE MEIKLE

n working with various clients on the topic of security, a common theme has emerged. Management and employees still labour under the perception that fraud is still the purview of unorganised individuals with an axe to grind against a specific company. Another popular opinion is that the company or individuals that

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

are experiencing fraud are the unfortunate victims caught in the blast of some hacker’s scatter shot attempt to make money. While sometimes true, the more likely explanation is far more disturbing. Fraud as a service or FaaS for the acronym collectors, has been a topic of concern for security professionals since 2008. RSA and others showcased this new trend emerging from the

O RGAN I SE D FR AU D

underground economy around November of that year. The acronym itself was coined from the Software as a Service (SaaS) term. Before we delve into the various facets of FaaS let us lay aside some of the assumptions that we have about the hacker/phisher crowd. Gone are the days where the primary theft is being perpetrated by the sociopath lonewolf in the basement. The major player is now organised crime, responsible for 70 percent of online fraud and billions in ill-gotten gains. Organised crime generates more revenue with fraud than narcotics. For many not closely involved or interested in the security industry these are surprising facts. Even more surprising are the business models that organised crime employs to maximize their profits. For the businessperson the fraudster is your competitor— one who is not hindered by ethics and has highly talented people working for him. They also can function in a dark mirror image of corporate culture, complete with ROI studies and the white boarding of ideas. With the backdrop properly set, we can now focus on the components of FaaS. Fraudulent activity is rapidly becoming based on Supply Chain Management (SCM). Reviewing the SCM framework, this includes, outsourcing/partnerships, development, procurement, manufacturing flow management/support, distribution, performance management and customer support. This translates into the underground economy and its fraud hosting services that are based on a subscription or flat-rate fee.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are discussed to ensure that those perpetrating the fraud are provided the service for which they paid. Once purchased, a fraud customer can review monthly status reports within a customer “dashboard” to check a current scheme’s profitability. The services can include “All in One” Trojan suites, which provide the subscriber custom command and control tools over thousands of infected computers in a botnet, from which you can direct a custom fraud campaign. A Pay-Per-Infection service or Centralized Trojan Infection, where a subscriber (criminal groups) can use the fraud providers resources to target specific computers and then only pay for those computers that are successfully infected with the preferred Trojan. HTML Injection (XSS) kits are commonly created and sold by the fraud service provider as a means to soften targeted computers for Trojan infection by using exploitable html code or as another method of gathering target data. Customer Support is also available to answer subscribers' issues with their purchased package and Service Level Agree-

Spear Phishing Rears its Ugly Head

pear phishing, or whaling, is a form of phishing attack that is mainly targeted at employees or high-profile targets in a business. Spear phishing emails attempt to get a user to divulge personal or sensitive information or click on a link or attachment

NEXT HORIZONS

that contains malicious software. In its Online Fraud Report for December 2009, RSA uncovered a post in the underground that shows a fraudster soliciting the email addresses of a company’s CEO and top executives and

is willing to pay $50 for them. Incidents of spear phishing are increasing so rapidly that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently issued a statement warning the public of the threat.

ments (SLAs) are discussed to ensure those perpetrating the fraud are provided the service for which they paid. More specialized services offered are Phone Channel Fraud (Vishing), where the fraud service provider can spoof Caller ID numbers (ANI Spoofing) of financial institutions, provide native language speakers for your target market and the ability for the fraudster to “cash out” their ill-gotten gains. Another is Money-Muling or MuleHerding. Here the fraud service provider can rope innocent people into laundering money via wire services so criminals can cash out their profits from one compromised bank account to another. The mules are then paid a percentage of the money transacted. These mulling jobs are sometimes advertised as “Regional Managers” or “Money Transfer Agent, a growth market due to the economic downturn and subsequent large unemployment. Much remains to be discussed regarding FaaS and security in general within the corporate environment, which cannot begin to be covered in just one short article. However, it was the intent to provide a brief overview to hopefully chip away at the outdated concepts that surround online fraud and its ramifications to online and offline business. —Mike Meikle is the CEO of Hawkthorne Group and a Senior Consultant and Senior Programme/ Project Manager for several organisations across government, health, telecommunications, corporate and education sectors, providing technological and organisational leadership.

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Gearing Up for Storage Virtualisation Storage virtualisation may not be high on the agenda for Indian companies, but CIOs are willing to experiment in the future By Suma P

e have not made any significant strides in storage virtualisation, and it is not on my cards for 2010,” said a CIO of an IT services company CTO Forum spoke to. The company has adopted server virtualisation in a significant manner, consolidating close to 150 servers across the globe to less than 30. This sentiment is echoed by Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group. “We have already implemented virtualisation using LPARs (logical partitions) in the servers supporting our critical applications. We have also adopted blade servers to decrease our server footprint. Now we are in the process of implementing server virtualisation and plan to bring down 19 physical servers to around two. There are no business imperatives currently to implement storage virtualisation since there are no significant constraints with regard to storage.” In short, there are more pressing things in which to invest, so storage virtualisation is pushed down the list. For now. Next year, things will be different. “We are evaluating the benefits of storage virtualisation and may consider it in the financial year 2011-12,” says Singh. This is not to say all companies in India are slow to adopt storage virtualisation. Says Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank, “Our organisation has deployed virtualisation on Intel servers, AIX servers and on storage. We have more than 700 VMs (virtual machines) created on the x86 environment, 300 LPARs on AIX servers and more than 100 TB virtualised on storage. We have reached a certain maturity level, both in terms of usage and in our process, and our next step will be to implement cloud computing.” This is a reflection of the storage growth needs of a company. Take a look at our survey of CIOs across various domains. From among the companies surveyed, those in the IT and the retail vertical have forecast similar storage growth requirements over the next one year (10-24%), as well as over the next 3-5 years (50-100%). Contrast this with the financial services industry, which forecasts 25-49% growth in storage requirements in the next one year, and between 100% to more

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

“The next phase of virtualisation adoption will expand beyond servers into infrastructure virtualisation. Companies will realise the advantages of advanced features for migration, business continuity and disaster recovery (DR).” SUBRAM NATARAJAN Executive IT Consultant, IBM Systems and Technology Group

“The Virtual Computing Environment coalition, formed jointly by Cisco and EMC with VMware ‘de-risks’ the infrastructure virtualisation journey of customers to private cloud implementation.” SANJAY LULLA Director, Technology Solutions, India and SAARC, EMC Corporation

“With India being a strategic centre for many global organisations, we see a good opportunity for storage virtualisation here.” KISHOR WIKHE Senior Vice President, Symphony Services

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

VEY SUR UM FOR SO

As storage needs increase over time in an organization, various storage media get added. And with this come a set of challenges. There is a lot of storage space available on paper, but in reality, due to the way the storage resources have been deployed, the storage space available for use is limited. To address the immediate requirements, more space is bought, often in an unplanned manner. Net effect: a heterogeneous storage environment which becomes more and more difficult to manage, and increased expenses—not just those related to purchase of hardware and related software, but also for buying space, and paying energy and cooling bills. In heterogenous environments, which are a combination of

33%

CTO

Why virtualise?

NAS and SANs, and multiple boxes, controlent ets w sked We a age budg y deploym r g lers and media, of sto technolo the storage of infor11% mation often ends 8% being in silos. Reach23% ing the right bit of data quickly frequently ends up being a time 25% consuming process, and companies often set their gy IT teams to create workchnolo ew te n in t n arounds to be able to access estme No inv an 25% 50% the data. Migrating data from h t s Les s than 25% to les one storage media to another 25% less than to 50% may be unpracticable in many s e h t O r companies. Hardly the most productive way to work, one could say. And not the fastest way either. Speed is of essence today. Taking backups results in a lot of downtime for the application in question. With your business running day and night, can you afford to have downtime, even if it is for critical areas such as backup? Enter storage virtualisation with its promise to end most of these woes. “Our investments in new storage boxes have

E: URC

than 300% over the next three-five years. Companies with spiralling storage needs are likely to be the ones embracing storage virtualisation earlier than the rest. It is not always burgeoning storage needs that make companies consider storage virtualisation. “The potential to cut infrastructure costs as well as operating costs, such as energy costs, are major business drivers. In our case storage virtualisation wasn't carried out to manage the growth in data, but to replace storage that had sweated enough. We have virtualised approximately 12TBs of storage,” says TG Dhandapani, Group CIO of TVS Motor Company.

ew n n ch i t e en stm rage tercentage e v In a sto s what p the new dat the CIO ill go in s.

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

reduced greatly,” says Dhandapani. Shetty of HDFC Bank says, “The primary reason for embarking on storage virtualisation was to keep the cost of storage under control especially for backup, standby and reporting copies. Secondly, we wanted to optimise storage utilisation and remove silos. Thirdly, segmentation or tiering of storage was needed to provide different classes of storage based on various requirements. Lastly, we also needed easy and transparent movement of data from one storage to another without any downtime to the application.”

Benefits Shetty continues, “We have been able to reduce the cost of our standby, backup and reporting copies. We have also been able to introduce the concept of tiered storage. We have been able to retire old storage by moving data from one storage to another using virtualisation.” That is in essence the benefits that storage virtualisation offers. Bring in tiered storage: What this means is that you don’t need to buy expensive enterprise-class storage for all your needs. There are applications and processes which do not need the highest-end equipment. With virtualisation you can select which applications need what type of storage and allocate accordingly, even do so dynamically. Simplify management: You can do away with having to work with multiple software to manage all the hardware. Increase utilisation: Once all your storage hardware is made to act like one through virtualisation, it is easier to make optimal use of the available storage space. Increase availability: Storage virtualisation makes it possible to backup data and carry out data migration on the fly. So your applications do not have to go offline as the backup or migration process is happening. Reuse your existing hardware: Bringing in storage virtualisation does not mean having to give up boxes you

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

Vendor Speak

Hitachi Data Systems From a technology standpoint, Hitachi Data Systems has these capabilities: Storage Device Virtualisation: The ability to virtualise any storage device at the controller level using open standards. Integrated virtualisation across block, file and content Volume capacity virtualisation which drives utilization, performance and non disruptive provisioning Virtual private storage that integrates with server virtualisation technologies Dynamic tiered storage with common software Non disruptive heterogeneous storage mobility with search capabilities

“Globally, Hitachi Data Systems is the storage virtualisation leader with more than 16,500 virtualisation solutions sold. Half of these solutions are used in a heterogeneous storage landscape. The Indian market offers significant opportunities for us.” VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL Vice President & GM, Hitachi Data Systems

already have. They can easily be brought into the storage pool, and assigned data as per their capacity and efficiency. So your investment stays protected. Companies are already well aware of the potential benefits. Says Singh of Aditya Birla Group, “We expect storage virtualisation to improve storage utilization, reduce complexity and management overheads and also help with tiering and aligning storage to the right applications or uses.” So what are the challenges? Shetty says, “We have not seen any challenges with storage virtualisation till date.” The thought is echoed by Singh who adds, “Though we have not adopted storage virtualisation yet, a proper Return on Investment (RoI) needs to be carried out before implementing it. There can be benefits from storage virtualisation in environments with heterogenous SANs and multiple storage families (low-end, mid-range and enterprise storage models) provided that the virtualisation exercise is preceded by proper planning.” Dhandapani suggests piloting a project. He says, “If the virtualisation projects are taken when the hardware is due for replacement, the proving of RoI will be easier and convincing.” “If one has huge amounts of data, migration will be a challenging task. But ultimately one will reap the benefits as the data grows further,” says IOC’s Gupta. The benefits of storage virtualisationare now well understood, but it is not high on the priority list of Indian CIOs. There are bigger issues at hand that need to be tackled. Saha says, “At Apeejay, the basic problem was the proliferation of multiple servers and not the proliferation of heterogeneous storage boxes. Hence we never had a need to provide for a single window solution for the management of storage boxes. Currently, we don’t find a need for storage virtualisation and hence we may not embark on this exercise in the near future.”

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

About t a h W epha nt i El e n h o R o t the m?

In an email interview with CTO Forum, Robert Presley, former IT Director, GameStop (world’s largest video game and entertainment software retailer with over 6,200 retail stores) says he loves virtualisation but CIOs have lost their way and are now putting a band-aid on the real problem.

ou have seen virtualisation as a technology evolve over the years. Did you imagine it would be where it is now? I have been working with virtualisation when it wasn’t a buzzword. Virtualisation, in my opinion, still masks the underlying problem that the CIO/CTO does not understand. We traded physical server sprawl for virtual server sprawl all the while reducing our power requirements to prolong the life of our data centres and reduce soft costs that I don’t think anyone is really paying attention to or understands how to show the cost savings without buying yet another infrastructure component “managed KVM/PDU’s” and

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

CIO should be able to show that he is the software that goes with it. going to cut 10 percent of the SAN/ In my opinion, virtualisation is yet NAS purchases every year as a result or to come of age – for instance, the softthat the company is going to be smarter ware application requirements haven’t about data storage needs by buying less changed from the Windows 9x days. expensive SATA disks arrays. Then again you have to deal with the outdated mindset of application owners who say, “I don’t want VMware in What are those points that a my sand-box”. These issues have led CIO needs to be careful about? to slower adoption. It just goes to show While buying storage (especially SAN that major application software players and high-end NAS arrays) CIOs need to have to drive harder to understand and understand that once you make a deal “adapt” to the new requirements. you are stuck unless you have a very No one has addressed the fundamenunderstanding business and talented IT tal issue that if we don’t address the department to allow you to do storage applications, and how they are deployed migrations. When buying storage, you into production and break the cycle of pay maintenance on the disks as well as “I need another server for my app, virthe array and software. However, make tual or not” we can’t address the probsure that all maintenance is rolled forlem. In a few years we will have the ward and coterminous with the original same problem we have now, with the SAN purchase because when you get same number of servers we started with your final expense bill on maintenance, ROBERT PRESLEY and a much bigger issue of managing it is going to be cheaper to buy the next Former IT Director, GameStop 1000’s of virtual machines on top of it. “fastest” storage array rather than pay It is pure mismanagement — plain and the expense. simple — and the CIOs/CTOs won’t bring the infrastructure and application leadership together and Who would you say is the leader in storage virtuaddress the “root cause”. Call it politics, ignorance, or just overalisation in the industry at this point? Is it IBM, HP, sight, the senior IT leadership has to step up and talk about the Sun or Hitachi? How does iSCSI fit? elephant in the room or else it “will not change.” I make no This is a relative question and is based on your business need. apologies for this statement and I simply don’t understand why EMC and HDS are on top for a reason and are the Ferrari’s of the it has gone unchecked for so long. SAN world. Everyone else resells everyone else. EMC is making Virtualisation also eats up an unbelievable amount of SAN huge strides with VMAX and HDS has always had a great prodstorage. The SAN/NAS arrays in our companies are two to three uct and generally pulled ahead in ease of management and suptimes what they should be. They are impacting the amount of port. IBM is pulling hard to get back into the spotlight with the data backed up downstream and ultimately the recovery costs. new IBM “XIV” SAN designed by the maker of the EMC DMX It is pure mismanagement of data. Again, senior leadership array. This looks very promising for ease of management and has to bring the infrastructure, database, and application teams support. One thing that is sure is that CIOs need more visibility together and “clean-up” the data. in the storage and HDS/IBM are doing this. CIOs have to see the big picture and get a CTO who sees the bigger picture and has vast experience in all the IT disciplines What does the future look like for storage virtualiand not just one area. CIOs can't afford to ignore the untapped sation? potential of consolidating applications. There should be better management, plain and simple. Give IT a way to better manage and support the SAN and continue the support with the latest network virtualisation features. What Do you think an investment in virtualisation makes Cisco is offering in the Nexus platform is a great example. sense? I hope that CIOs will see the potential of virtualising their Virtualisation at the storage (SAN/NAS) level makes sense. In application and services. Think about it. If you were to just conmy opinion storage is so badly mismanaged that it grows out of solidate your services onto a single Windows server you would control. Once this happens it affects a lot of things down stream maximize the use of the server, defer buying virtualisation softlike backups, DR, replication, etc. which in turn increases ware and maintenance and simplify your management of seroperating expense in those areas. By addressing the SAN/NAS vices and support. data requirements, CIOs can save up to four times across the enterprise. Storage virtualisation helps to offset the data sprawl. The

“In a few years we will have the same problem we have now, with the same number of servers we started with and a much bigger issue of managing 1000’s of virtual machines on top of it.”

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Towards the Solid State We are heading there but not so soon. High costs and the lack of a tech roadmap are delaying SSD deployments By Team CTOF

t isn’t making solid sense, not just yet. We are talking about solid state storage, the technology that has been around for years, but still hasn’t made inroads into the enterprise space in any major way. On the face of it, the technology makes a lot of sense. No moving parts, storage made from silicon chips, no spinning metal platters or streaming tape. This means increased durability, faster access to data. Yet costs are still high, which has slowed adoption in the enterprise. But there is much more than meets the eye. Let’s look at where we are headed in this type of storage.

Benefits

Better access times: Compared to hard disk drives (HDD), flash memory offers faster access times and lower latencies. So while capacities of HDDs have grown exponentially, their read/write access times have not improved in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, the processing power of servers has been increasing, so the data access latency increases. Solid state storage comes as a useful alternative here as it offers access times that are 100 to 1000 times that of drives with mechanical parts. It offers higher bandwidth throughput as well. Because of this, solid state storage offers very high random input/output per second (IOPS) performance. Lower price/IOPS: The upfront costs for solid state storage devices can be huge, and working out one-to-one per terabyte costs versus HDDs will tilt the balance heavily towards the HDD side. But proponents of solid stage storage say that is the wrong parameter to base your decisions on. Instead it should be price/IOPS, where solid state storage scores higher over HDDs. Reduced energy costs support green initiatives: Solid state storage devices use less energy as they don’t have any mechanical parts that need to be moved. This leads to lower cooling needs. And they are silent as well. But before diving into taking up solid state storage, do assess the way in which you would be using it for your kind of business. In case you need to opt for DRAM to enable faster write processes, the batteries to power the DRAM environment will have to be factored into your power and cooling needs. Ashok K Gupta, Chief Information Systems Manager, Indian Oil Corporation, says “If questions related to energy efficiency are raised, solid state is the answer. But today it is not available off the shelf. Hence, we will have to wait for some time to replace conventional hard drives with solid state drives.” In various forms: You can have solid state storage on form factors of HDD, so that you can

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

continue to use your existing storage arrays. At the same time you can also have them in other forms as well that can take smaller form factors. Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank says, “Solid state drives will have limited usage because of the difference in costs. Wherever there are challenges with data centre infrastructure and performance is a big concern, SSD will definitely be an option. We foresee an increase in adoption of SSDs and consequently a drop in their prices.”

The flip side Costs are still high: While the costs for solid state storage devices have been coming down steadily over the years, they still remains high, as far as most vendors are concerned. “Everybody would like to switch to SSD as soon as the costs come down. The present cost is many times higher than motorised hard disks. We may start switching over to SSD when the cost is around two times that of the HDD,” says Gupta.

Vendor Speak

IBM

IBM is making solid-state storage affordable with innovative architectures, system and application integration, and management tools that enable effective use of solid-state storage. IBM says the new offerings boost performance by as much as 800 percent, while reducing physical storage footprint and energy consumption by 80 percent. IBM is adding flash drives to its power systems and expanding its x Series offerings.

HDS

Innovative flash-based drive technology combined with Hitachi's virtualised storage services platform is designed to provide good performance of businesscritical applications, with improved utilization, while also reducing power and cooling consumption.

ed Storag r e Ti ning groune i d a g

Aman Munglani, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner India says 2010 will be a fairly strong year for the external storage market vis-a-vis 2009 that saw negative growth.

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

Price/capacity scores will remain low: As is the case, the price of HDDs have been falling too, especially for higher capacities. So price per GB has been falling. Solid state storage is still very expensive, so in price per GB comparisons, hard drives will score better than solid state storage. But prices will come down in the long run. In January 2010, in its worldwide 2009-2013 Solid State Drive Forecast Update, IDC said, “Pricing remains a key metric for SSD adoption in all market segments. The slowdown in IT spending over the past 18 months has led to production cutbacks in NAND semiconductors, subsequently slowing overall SSD price reductions. However, the long term decline in the cost of NAND memory will translate into lower price points for SSDs. These lower price points, coupled with increased SSD capacities, will make them a compelling alternative to HDDs in certain market segment.” Complex write process: Reading flash memory is rapid, but one cannot say the same thing for the write process, as

What are your key findings about the storage market in India? Is it poised to grow? Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue totaled more than US$3.9 billion in the Q3 of 2009, a 7.3 percent decline compared to Q3 of 2008. The Indian ECB market dropped a significant 20 percent year-on-year basis and totaled US$ 43 million in 2009. IBM (23.4 percent), EMC (21percent) and Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle, (18.5 percent) continued to be the top three storage players and together accounted for 61 percent market share of all ECB revenues in India in the last quarter. While the previous three quarters saw a downturn in the storage industry, there was a strong surge in demand during the month of September. Companies are facing challenges such as low utilisation of available storage, junk machines due to

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

duplicate data and so on. Storage virtualisation, de-duplication along with VTL (virtual tape library), thin provisioning and tiered storage technology will gain ground. Storage virtualisation technology has been there from quite some time but it has gained traction only now. De-duplication, if effectively adopted, can save huge revenues because every company has tons of duplicate data clogging up file servers. Large enterprises in BFSI and telecom sector have already started using tiered storage. Do you think cloud storage will gain prominence? I am afraid cloud-based services are still evolving. The concept of cloud-based storage is still raw but if you have stor-

age with other infrastructure like servers, network, etc. in the cloud environment, it will grow. A company can save a lot of costs signing up for the could service as opposed to buying storage. For instance, if a company’s storage requirement is 20 terabytes (TB), but suddenly for a particular project it requires 20 terabytes more then the company can buy the additional storage from the service provider without adding that additional capacity which will otherwise go waste during off-peak time. It's a myth that the real growth in this area will come from SMBs; large enterprises are also looking at it — specially for their application-based services like back-up and recovery.

What will drive the storage market in 2010? Gartner predicts a strong year for the external storage market in 2010. We are predicting a 13-14 percent growth in the overall external storage revenues in 2010. While traditional buyers such as BFSI, telecom and manufacturing will continue to invest in external storage, there are other emerging verticals that will fire up this whole market. Government is the fastest growing vertical in India and will play a significant role in the growth of the external storage market. Additionally, retail and medical archival systems are two other emerging verticals that will fuel demand. —By Vinita Gupta

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

VEY SUR UM R SOU

Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the enter enterprise space anytime soon. They will co-exist. In fact new storage virtualization offerings build in support for SSD arrays now, thus strengthening their entry into data centres. The area that SSDs are replacing HDDs is short stroking, a way in which storage administrators leave the outer areas of hard drives empty to enable faster reads. This means that there is a lot of unused space across all HDDs. Replacing them with fewer SSDs turns out to be more optimal, improves performance significantly, and takes up lesser space. In a company, there would be loads of data which need to be stored, but are not accessed frequently. For many applications, your current storage media would work just fine. SSDs will find favour wherever speed is of essence. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) identifies some killer applications

44%

FOR

Teamed up with HDD

for solid state stora g e . Fl a s h xt cte Expe in the ne terprises e n SSD is best g e a r sto 2% for business 2% notebook com% 0 1 puter storage, 8% 2% while cached flash 34% RAID SSD’s killer applications are data warehousing, video on demand, seismic processing and render renderknow Don't an 10% ing. DDR RAM SSD is th s Les han 100% 24% great for write-intensive ore t 10%- 9% M 4 25%- 4% online transaction pro7 50%- 9% 9 cessing, web transaction 75%databases, mission critical data warehousing, etc. Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group believes, “Solid state drives can be exploited for lower capacities and come with the promise of improved reliability, speed and energy efficiency. However, its cost/performance and scalability claims are yet to be proven.” Shetty concurs, “The current challenges are with most vendors taking time in designing their storage boxes with SSDs. We hope to see a major change in this space soon.”

CTO CE:

this process is more complex, and takes longer. For enterpriseclass storage, faster writing is enabled by using an intermediate cache to hasten the processes up, or using multiple flash chips in parallel, which would be faster than going the sequential way. However, this may not be the right solutions for all businesses. Reliability: Issues have been raised about the performance, endurance and reliability of flash memory devices. Over the years, solid state storage devices have improved on all these grounds, and now build in clever controllers that enable better performance and endurance of the memory.

ata n d 010 i h wt n2 ata Gro rage ie growth inn dIndian i g o s st d percenta12 month

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Cloud Storage: Yet to Take Off The service is still evolving and is yet to make it to the priority list of CIOs By Suma P

usiness users are not ready for cloud storage,” is the verdict of a report from Forrester released in January this year. The report is based on a hardware survey conducted in 2009 and sums up the sentiment, not just across the globe, but here in India as well. Why is it so, despite all the talk and interest garnered by the ‘cloud’? And what is cloud storage anyway, the definition being as foggy as the name. Overtime, cloud storage has come to mean data storage made available over a network as a service, but is also hugely scalable and is billed on a usage basis. It is also application agnostic, which means saving data on a cloud application will not count as cloud storage. Cloud storage is also not limited to any specific location, and is based on commodity components. IDC says cloud is a way to describe an infrastructure designed to deliver storage as a service. All the talk and interest about cloud storage has been centred on the benefits cloud can bring to an enterprise. It is meant to help you control burgeoning costs of storage, improve the efficiency of data centres, and reduce the complexity of technology. You are not dependent on a single server, nor is there any direct dependency on the underlying hardware. You don’t have to buy space in anticipation of growth, you just add as you grow. You can manage it all from a single point. However many companies are still grappling with basic issues related to cloud storage. Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President & GM, Hitachi Data Systems says, “The key issue slowing adoption of cloud storage is the lack of clear realistic business models and pricing models. Bandwidth usage and security are other factors slowing adoption.” It seems unrealistic to expect enterprises to move their storage to the cloud anytime soon. Most enterprises have put in huge investments into their storage environments, and do not see a convincing reason to rip it all up and move to the cloud, especially when data security is paramount. Among the various segments of cloud storage, it is cloud backup that is expected to see quicker adoption. IDC calls it one of top five applications for the cloud in 2010. With cloud backup, companies can recover their data quickly while paying only for the ser-

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

impo rt deduance of d plica a tion ta Dedup lication so a

lution sa the da to de-clutte ta is hig r enterp rise ag h on enda

28%

11% 1%

Not at a importa ll Not very nt im portant SOUR

3% Somew h importa at nt

CE: C TO FO RUM

Very importa nt

SURV

Critical

vices they need. And this can easily be woven into the company’s disaster recovery plan. However, companies are not very keen on putting their primary storage on to the cloud, at least not just yet. Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group, says, “Enterprise cloud storage is still evolving. For the mass market of individual consumers, cloud storage seems to offer great benefits at acceptable risks. However, enterprises will still be hesitant to completely put all their business critical and valuable information on the cloud without a proper scrutiny of the service. The exercise of moving to the cloud will require detailed planning to ensure a successful transition.” Who can opt for cloud storage? If you are starting off with your

storage setup, a good look at cloud storage could be well worth your while. But if you have high-transaction databases, it’s best to not put those on the cloud. Nor is the cloud a good option for temporary storage. But if you have storage demands that are hard to accurately predict, you are a good candidate for cloud storage. Or if you need a storage tier that doesn’t cost a bomb, or need cheap long-term archiving, cloud storage is a good option. Private, Public or Hybrid The real costs benefits of the cloud cannot be realized if companies opt for a private cloud wherein they buy, configure, manage and support their own hardware and software. There are only a handful of organisations which would require this kind of involvement and investment. Already IT and storage teams are unable to manage the enterprise IT infrastructure complexity on a daily basis, and this would strain the teams further, even putting availability of the infrastructure at risk. But companies are wary. Aditya Birla Group’s Singh says, “If the cost models can offer compelling value, private cloud would seem to be able to offer the capability more in line with what would work well for core applications. We may carry out a POC (Proof Of Concept) using the public cloud for email services after thoroughly evaluating the costs and security aspects of the same.” Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank, says, “Cloud for storage is important in enterprises. If the cloud is internal, there is investment required. We have already created a cloud for storage inside the organisation by providing storage on demand. We are in the process of refining the same. There are challenges with using an external cloud.” He continues, “A hybrid model would work best in our vertical. There is a need to balance security and cost saving, so companies will experiment with the hybrid mode for their non-critical systems first before they move to the public mode.” There is a definite interest in the cloud for the cost benefits it brings. But companies are also exercising caution. There are more questions than answers right now. Some of them are: Will my data be secure? The cloud may be available as per the SLAs, but would I be able to access my data easily? What about latencies? How does virtualisation fit into all this? These questions need to be addressed before cloud storage can really take off, not just in India but globally.

“Enterprises will be hesitant to put all their business-critical information on the cloud without properly scrutinising the service.”

“Lack of a realistic business model is hampering adoption of cloud computing. Bandwidth usage and security are the other issues.”

NEERAJ PAL SINGH Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group

VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL Vice President & GM, Hitachi Data Systems

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Make Storage Green Energy efficiency in storage infrastructure can bring real gains to enterprises, besides helping them cut down on carbon emissions By Suma P

n the last few years, a lot of efforts have been directed towards making hardware energy efficient. However, its mostly the server architecture that has been the focus of attention and research. Now, vendors are developing ways to make storage energy efficient too.

Get the big picture You cannot drive efficiencies in the storage setup without a good understanding of your data, a knowledge of how the storage has been provisioned, what capacities are being used, and so on. This will bring to fore the underutilised capacities, the type of data stored on various devices, and so on. And it will give you a very good idea of how to bring in efficiencies. Should you consolidate, virtualize, replace some hard drives with solid state drives, look for drives with special power saving featuresâ&#x20AC;Śyou will come up with your list.

Consolidate Do you really need multiple small capacity HDDs for your data, or can you replace them with a few bigger ones? Or can you replace the small capacity HDDs with the same number of higher capacity onesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;this will increase your capacity, but keep your power needs the same. Virtualise With storage virtualisation you can provision storage to fewer physical drives and thus improve the levels of utilisation. With thin provisioning, you can have capacity allocated when you need them, and not have to provision space in anticipation.

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Bring in energy efficient components Drives, controllers, arraysâ&#x20AC;Śall these components pack energy saving mechanisms. There are drives that support various spindle speeds so that they can slow down when data is not being accessed. Controllers that use less power are now available. You could also opt for smaller drives that fit into your storage arrays, but which will consume far less power.

Try new energy savers Opting for solid state drives translates into lower power costs as there are no mechanical parts that are made to move. They have smaller footprints, and thus save space as well. MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) enables powering down multiple disks at any given time.

Explore FCoE Using Fibre Channel over Ethernet, you can consolidate the network (IP) and SAN traffic through a single switch. This helps

you reduce the number of network interface cards you need to deploy to connect the storage and IP networks. FCoE also brings down the number of switches you need and the amount of cables required. And it reduces power and cooling costs. However, FCoE may not be the solution for all storage setups. You must do a cost-benefits analysis before you opt for it.

Go back to tape Tape is the most power efficient media of all. So with all these efforts to control costs to stay on the right side of green, there is a renewed interest in using tape.

Dedupe Removing duplicates of your data releases storage capacity. And also save your bandwidth usage. This brings in efficiencies.

Tier your storage Put the most-accessed data on expensive high-speed storage devices, and move the less-accessed data to lower-speed cheaper devices. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tiering of storage. However, you might want to

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

re-look at your storage setup to see if tiering has been deployed optimally. Software that enables the moving of data across tiers in a seamless manner also ensures that there are many takers for tiering.

Measure efficiency This is a tough one. While the US Environmental Protection Agency has embarked on its project to bring in green storage specifications, there is plenty of work still left to be done. EPA is aiming to develop an Energy Star rating for storage equipment. While all vendors claim efficiencies, there are no real standards available to help a customer measure how energy efficient the devices really are. With specifications and metrics likely to make an appearance shortly, vendors will be helping customers understand their device efficiencies. There are also discussions on various models for measuring efficiency, such as those that measure energy consumed when data is at rest, others that measure energy consumption when data is being accessed at typical rates, and so on.

Dispose in a green way You might be looking at retiring your old storage devices. Being able to dispose them off in an eco-friendly manner is also a matter that falls under your green storage initiatives. Check with your storage vendors about the disposal processes and opt for them. There are many ways to go green in the enterprise storage space. Green storage is a lot about driving efficiencies through virtualisation, information lifecycle management, and using intelligent software. However, all this requires you to dive deeply into your data and understand how it is being stored and read, and then arrive at a storage strategy that focuses on delivering business benefits while keeping the costs in check.

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

e Allocat g a r an Issu io o n e St is

Aniket Dongre, Lead Analyst, Enterprise Storage and Solutions Practice at IDC India spoke to CTO Forum about the storage market in India.

ow is the disk storage market performing in India? In Q3 (July-September) 2009, IDC estimates the revenue for the India disk storage systems market to be US$ 62 million, a decline of 11.4% year-on-year (over Q3 2008) and 3.9% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009). In terms of new capacity, the market saw a growth of 13.9% yearon-year (over Q3 2008) and 13.0% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009). EMC leads the India disk storage systems market for Q3, 2009 with a 27% market share in terms of factory revenue followed closely by IBM. EMC and IBM have been vying for the top slot for last few quarters on the basis of some strong gains in the government, telecommunications and financial services verticals. How challenged are enterprises in storing and managing their data? Most of the data created in enterprises today is unstructured and duplicated. Most enterprises keep production environment data on Tier 1

storage and after a certain number of days move it to secondary storage. Thus, judicious allocation of storage, based on importance and requirements, is an issue. Also, retrieving data for further use is another major concern for enterprise IT managers. Are companies actually adopting storage virtualisation or is it just a hype? As a trend, storage virtualisation has started receiving due attention in India, specially from verticals such as banking and financial services, manufacturing and telecommunications but actual adoption is still in a nascent stage with approximately 8% of Indian enterprises adopting the same during 2008-09. Vendors are seeing a stronger uptake in large enterprises and select mid-sized companies. Will the adoption of cloud storage be driven by service providers? Increasingly ‘storage-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud storage’ will be driven by Tele-

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Doing More With Less With data growing at an exponential rate, enterprises are looking at data deduplication as a way to reduce storage costs and increase efficiency By Ashwani mishra

achin Jain, CIO and CISO of Gurgaon-based Evalueserve had a challenge at hand. The company had cross-functional teams that worked from different locations. These teams ended up working on the same document and creating multiple copies of it and storing them separately. This resulted in duplication of data and consumed around 30 to 40 percent of the overall storage space. “We realised that our storage was not being utilised efficiently and we wanted to address this issue immediately,” says Jain who decided to go for a data deduplication solution to reduce cost, control data growth, reduce storage requirements and improve performance. Similar to Jain, many enterprises acknowledge the fact that as the amount of primary data within Continue on Next Page

com Service Providers (TSPs) or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to service enterprise customer requirements as they look at providing value added services (VAS) and also utilising their infrastructure better. The networked storage market was flat in 2009. Is it expected to rebound with 20% growth in 2010? Networked storage will see increased adoption in 2010 to meet demands arising from expansion plans of the IT/ IteS

and telecom companies as well as to support enterprise IT initiatives like data centre consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). What new opportunities do you see in the near future? The economy in India is improving and financial results for most enterprises for the second and third quarters of 2009 have shown promising signs. Customers have started spending again on storage infrastructure. India’s disk storage systems market

is increasingly driven by business continuity and disaster recovery solutions and enterprises have invested heavily on building the same even during the recent economic downturn. This trend has also helped drive the overall storage solutions market. Increasingly, unified storage platforms will find adoption in enterprises; VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) will drive the adoption of high end storage solutions in future. —By Vinita Gupta

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

ics name y d g g ngin tora rage cha f data s ce for new sto o e preferen ogies

Stor age Speci a l

organisations continues to grow, the amount of duplicate occupies significant amounts of storage infrastructure. Redundant data quickly consumes storage resources at an alarming rate, driving up business costs through increased storage purchases and management. Within no time, storage consumption grows exponential and becomes extremely difficult to control.

Benefits galore

pris Enter

ol techn

21%10%8% 8% 15%

7% 34% 12%

1% 1%

44%

16%

14%

ack lutio With deduplication, only “unique” data is written during the Tape b recovery so s ter n n s o o a ti ti is a lu z D o li backup process, which means that significantly less disk capacVirtua N ance s in SAN li e p g m ra o d C Sto ste l SA y inve ity is needed on the back-end to store changes. This offers a hanne Alread ow FibreC N n A k S 't I number of important business benefits such as reduced capex Don R V E Y iSCS cation edupli M SU ORU Data d kup TO F and opex costs. C : E c a RC SOU Disk b Most importantly, organisations can reduce backup windows and improve restoration times by using disk versus tape. istic expectation of what can be delivered,” says Adrian De Luca, Recovery time objectives (RTOs) will improve because data can Director, Storage Management and Data Protection, Asia Pacific, be recovered from disk. With more capacity available, IT may Hitachi Data Systems. choose to increase the frequency of backups conducted during There are a few problems that CIOs can encounter when they the day, improving recovery point objectives (RPOs). look at various deduplication solutions. One of the most criti“Data deduplication also facilitates server virtualisation deploycal among them appears in the scenario when data deduplicaments as it eliminates much of the disadvantages of server virtution is applied utilising proprietary formats. Here data is written alisation projects,” says Surajit Sen, Director–Channels, Marketdirectly into the file headers. These headers describe the maning and Alliances, NetApp India. ner in which data has been deduped and Virtual machine disk images contain provide pointers to applications. These highly redundant data and increase storapplications are assured that they will get age capacity requirements. Through servthe right access to the copy of the data er virtualisation, enterprises can reduce Data Deduplication required. According to industry analysts the amount of servers in their environStrategy at the system of pointers that results from ments and through deduplication they Evalueserve these solutions can lead to some perforcan reduce the amount of storage. mance degradation. Though data deduplication is an imporEvalueserve plans to address the chal“Our choice of the provider will only tant technology that is quickly being lenge of data replication using a twobe finalised only after considering all embraced by users as they struggle with pronged strategy. aspects of design, including space savissues of data proliferation, enterprises In the first step, the company has set ings, efficiency, performance overhead, must ensure that they make the right a rule to automatically archive data that and resiliency,” says Vijay Kumar, Chief choice while selecting providers. is not being used in the last six months. Manager - Information Technology of This data will be moved to a secondBangalore-based The Himalaya Drug ary storage that is less expensive. This Making the right Company which is also looking at a data method will improve performance and pick deduplication solution for their storage also save storage space. environment. In the second step, the data deduplicaIt is expected that the amount of storJain from Evalueserve adds that the tion solution will be applied to the data age will be reduced with deduplication choice of a data deduplication solution that has been stored on the secondary solutions. However, the results will vary should be based on how effectively the storage. This will remove duplicate data depending on the technology one chooses solution fits within the storage environfrom the archived storage. After carrying and the type of data that is being dupliment. “The solution should come from out the deduplication implementation cated. Marketing brochures that claim a reputed vendor who has experience in on the secondary storage environment, large deduplication ratios are simply an this technology,” he adds. the company will use the solution on the indication of what is possible in the best Data deduplication will become a critiprimary storage environment as well. The case scenario and may not be achievable cal enabling technology. Besides, it can be entire process is likely to be completed in in each and every environment. successfully paired with other emerging the next six months. “It is important for enterprises to quanstorage technologies including thin protify. Many storage providers offer estimavisioning and virtualisation. tion tools or tests that provide a more real-

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Riverbed’s Cloudspecific WAN Optimisation Tech

here's a catch with cloud storage, says Robert Healey, Marketing Evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed Technology. “Moving your company’s data storage to someone else’s data centre half-way across the world, while potentially cheaper than building in-house infrastructure, will have huge impact on performance,” he says. The same performance degradation is experienced by cloud-based software applications as distance and network latency across the WAN grows.

To solve the application performance problems caused by the distance between the enterprise and their cloud operator’s remote data centre, cloud-specific WAN optimisation technology is the only clear solution, Healey feels. Using it in storage environments allows companies to back up and restore more data quickly, while reducing costs. “Our new cloud-storage optimisation technology promises to reduce both cost and complexity for cloud storage services — without any impact on performance,” he says. The company has recently announced the release of the its WAN optimisation device Steelhead 7050, which uses the new Solid State Disk technology, has 10GE network interfaces and can de-duplicate (compress) storage and other traffic across the WAN at multi-Gigabit rates. “We are working towards the release of cloud-specific versions of its products to accelerate remote access to cloud-based software applications and storage services. This technology is already in trial stages and is showing unprecedented throughput and performance,” says Healey. —By Vinita Gupta

High Performance FileBased Storage Services is Symantec’s Pick ymantec feels the key challenge for enterprises this year would be not just managing storage architecture but also managing storage resources and the data explosion. The utilisation of storage resources is still low and hence needs to be optimised. Storage management software like archiving and storage virtualisation that assist organisations in automating IT policies will be of prime importance this year. “Users are increasingly turning to technologies such as thin provisioning to make better use of existing storage. Thin provisioning will provide organisations the ability to deploy 'thin' storage, reclaiming storage during online migra-

“Users are increasingly turning to technologies such as thin provisioning” DARSHAN JOSHI VP, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec

tions and driving operational efficiency,” feels Darshan Joshi, Vice President, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. Enterprises should also focus on incorporating a comprehensive data protection strategy within their IT strategy irrespective of backing up data to tape or disk. Symantec recently launched FileStore, a new solution enabling organisations to build scalable, high-performance filebased storage services - including private and public clouds. The solution can manage and protect critical information, scale performance and capacity non-disruptively as application needs change. —By Vinita Gupta

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

Hewlett Packard Bets on Cloud and SSDs t a time, when companies are looking to increase performance and capacity, simply adding storage may result in inefficient silos while taking the physical data centre/storage room to their limits. More than ever, companies need to get the most out of their technology investments. For this reason, technologies such as virtualisation and automation will continue to gain traction as they help businesses drive down costs, feels Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Storage Works Division, HP India.

“The end-user price of solid state drive technology will continue to decline” PRAKASH KRISHNAMOORTHY Country Manager, HP StorageWorks.

Convergence of infrastructure along with storage virtualisation will be two key trends. Converged infrastructure brings together pools of networking, storage, servers, management software, power and cooling in one single environment, allowing organisations to easily build an elastic infrastructure. “Storage plays a critical role in the converged infrastructure by allowing customers to virtualise stored data and create a unified virtual resource pool that is instantly accessible to support changing business needs,” feels Krishnamoorthy. HP feels that some of the future opportunities in storage will revolve around areas like cloud-based storage and solid state drives (SSDs). “This year we will see more companies take advantage of cloud computing to cut costs and become more agile in a world of data explosion,” he feels. SSDs, are still in the early phase of adoption, but these drives are increasingly making their way into everyday consumer PCs and enterprises. “As more vendors continue to enter the market with SSDs and volumes start to increase, the end-user price of the technology will continue to decline,” feels Krishnamoorthy. —By Vinita Gupta

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

“Virtualising the storage environment will help reap maximum benefits from virtualisation” SURAJIT SEN Director, Channels Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India

It’s Storage Virtualisation for NetApp nterprises have spent a lot of money on storage systems. However, the storage efficiency in data centres for most of the enterprises has been as low as 30 to 35 percent. So increasing storage efficiency will be high on the priority for CIOs this year, feels Surajit Sen, Director, Channels, Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India. Thin provisioning and data deduplication can be considered as some of the other key solutions to increase storage utilisation and reduce costs. Storage virtualisation is another area that enterprises will look at this year. “We have seen massive deployments of server virtualisation. Desktop virtualisation is gaining momentum. However, enterprises should realise that to achieve the larger objective of virtualisation, they have to virtualise their storage environment as well,” feels Sen. The advent of cloud computing has brought big changes to storage strategies, with customers craving pricing models that align with usage and systems that can manage ever-increasing data volumes. Moving forward, this model will be crucial in the evolution of enterprise data centres. Enterprises should look at service providers that are uniquely positioned to deliver solutions to suit to enterprise architectural or operational decisions. GigaOM on NetApp: NetApp is making a big push as a provider of storage infrastructure for cloud service providers. The company has been a leader in the growing data deduplication space, but that status when jeopardized when EMC stole Data Domain from NetApp’s grasp. —By Ashwani Mishra

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

ell feels that storage optimisation will be a major trend in enterprise storage environments this year. “What we are looking at is to create cost-effective archiving solutions to better manage record retention, as well as assist in migrating lower-tier storage to lower-cost platforms, which can dramatically cut total storage costs,” says Phillip A. Davis, Vice President, Solutions, APAC and Japan, Large Enterprise Business Unit, Dell. “In addition, enterprises should also look at data deduplication to save storage costs,” he feels. Consolidation of storage will result in fewer licenses to manage, better utilisation of each device and operational expenditure savings. For this enterprises can look at tiered storage. Disaster recovery and compliance are other key areas that will continue to see adoption. The RoI on storage consolidation using our solutions could be around 30

spent on Ethernet and IP as compared to Fibre Channel. It has more recently moved on to 8 GB but there is no roadmap beyond 16 GB Fibre Channel and they have proved expensive. “Dell already has the 10 GB Ethernet in the market and 40 GB is well defined. They are easier to deploy, manage and virtualise as compared to Fibre Channel that increases complexity,” says Davis.

Dell’s take: Storage consolidation all the way percent with greater efficiency and utilisation of storage. “There is still a lot of confusion around cloud offerings and we do not think that enterprises would be ready for adoption this year. What we do see happening is the formation of a strategy in the next six to nine months to determine which pieces of the infrastructure they want to migrate on to the cloud,” feels Davis. A few years ago, enterprises preferred having their storage on Fibre Channel, because it gave higher performance and was robust too. Today, more money is

Dynamic Tiered Storage is HDS’ Mantra ccording to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the trend for enterprises this year would be to look at a ‘single data storage platform’ to reduce storage costs and simplify management. “Storage virtualisation, dynamic tiered storage and file and content services would be our three main focus areas for enterprise customers this year. These solutions would help them reduce costs by around 20 to 30 percent and increase efficiency,” says Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager, India, Hitachi Data Systems. “We are also betting high on storage virtualisation this year. It has the potential to simplify storage administration, allocation and reallocation of resources and reduce the costs involved in managing different storage assets,” adds Venugopal. Enterprises must not think of virtualisation as a point product. It should be an important part of their long term infrastructure strategy.

IDC on Dell Dell has built a full line of storage relate services and tools that address enterprise needs. Through a combination of in-house expertise and strategic partnerships, Dell is in a position to address customer needs for storage solutions that go beyond technology and ultimately provide ROI matching with the customer's original investment. —By Ashwani Mishra

“Cloud storage from our perspective is not a solution but an approach. We launched our cloud storage software offering designed specifically to enable rapid provisioning and deployment of storage systems without needing new hardware. Cloudbased or virtualised storage consolidates and virtualises disks and controllers to scale capacity and performance and provides enhanced resilience while reducing both capex and opex for service providers and end-users,” says Venugopal.

“Storage virtualisation, dynamic tiered storage and file and content services would be our three main focus areas enterprise customers” VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL Vice President and GM, India, Hitachi Data Systems

GigaOM on HDS HDS' reputation across the major storage-product areas ensures traditional sales, and its strong capabilities in thin provisioning, storage virtualisation and SLA enforcement should make HDS a player in tomorrow’s dynamic, cloud-based data centres. —By Ashwani Mishra

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

cov er story

Stor age Speci a l

EMC Trumps its tie-up with other vendors

“In 2010, the primary issue will be management of storage resources.” ABHILESH GULERIA Country Head, ITPF, NEC India

MC has partnered closely with VMware and Cisco on V-Max. Manoj Chugh, President, India and SAARC, EMC says that organizations are desperate for a new model of IT operation. “Unfortunately, the structure of the industry isn't naturally enabling to that model – meaning, vertically-integrated companies do not have the right technology and technology leaders do not work together to benefit customers.” The intention behind the strategy of closely partnering with VMware and Cisco is to change that with a relationship built around a shared

“This coalition has been brought together to accelerate the virtualisation of IT infrastructure.” MANOJ CHUGH President, India and SAARC, EMC.

vision of the next generation in IT called the private cloud. The VCE coalition (Virtual Computing Environment) seeks collaboration in development, services and partner enablement that ‘de-risks’ the infrastructure virtualisation journey of customers to private cloud implementation. “It’s the power of three. This coalition has been brought together to accelerate the virtualisation of IT infrastructure by combining best-of-breed technology leaders with end-to-end vendor accountability, enabling IT to be consumed in a breakthrough way at a lower total cost and increased speed for business benefit,” Chugh says. This does not mean that products will be less tightly integrated with products of other vendors, Chugh says. One of the biggest issues the industry has faced over the years is to meet performance requirements at scale, Chugh says. Storage requirements have been increasing exponentially and maintaining service levels is getting difficult. Customers have to spend hours of analysis and review time in managing performance levels and revisiting existing deployment. Having enough headroom for the next upgrade arising due to mergers, new users, adding new branches, etc. has always been a challenge, usually leading to fresh purchases and eventually higher cost. —By Aditya Kelekar

storage trends that will gain momentum in 2010 are virtualization, de-duplication and the introduction of energy-efficient features, says Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head, ITPF, NEC India. In 2010, de-duplication will gain prominence as a feature, rather than a standalone technology, Guleria says. Majority of enterprises still have not deployed de-duplication, but will leverage easier deployments next year as it becomes built into most storage offerings – everything from back-up software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software. "As more enterprises reap the benefits of de-duplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources," he says. As a result, enterprises will look to vendors to deploy simplified and cross-platform de-duplication management that save time and money. Guleria notes that in 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing ‘green’ technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organization’s environmental standing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a ‘green’ strategy. IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT efficiency benefits. NEC has recently launched NEC Storage E-Series that have iSCSI interface or Fibre channel interface. Initial costs can be minimized and customers can leverage the existing LAN also. In the Fibre channel model, one can have the benefit of high performance with 4Gbps host interface. —By Aditya Kelekar

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

De-duplication will find many takers: NEC

thectoforum.com

BY INVITATION P K GUPTA | gupta_pk@emc.com

PK GUPTA is Chairman, SNIA South Asia. He has over 24 years of industry experience. He specialises in network and storage management and data backup and archiving solutions.

Future of the Storage Industry. Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to worry CIOs. asked a question: how is the storage industry doing? In one word â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Great! Information is growing at a terrific pace in organisations which are creating a wealth of knowledge on one hand but causing information management challenges on the other. Storage industry is creating storage networking technologies to store, access, protect, automate, virtualise and leverage this information created in existing IT infrastructure or future data centers. The year 2009 was very challenging with the global economy in a recessionary mode. However the future of storage looks great with growth of digital data growth in all walks of life, both personal as well as work-related. For example, social networking sites are creating peta bytes (PB - 1015) of data every week, millions of videos are getting uploaded on You Tube every day, organisations send billions of email every day with mega bytes of attachments, banks transact millions of records every day, public sector is digitizing data at an unprecedented rate and many more industries are joining this digital revolution. Home networking has tremendous growth: a recent survey showed that by 2013, I WAS

an average home will create 2.2 TB data totaling up to 9 TB, out of which 5 TB will be commercial content. The other industry growing in tandem is security, as whatever data is created needs to be secured from crooks who are eyeing personal and company information as it is the life blood of organizations today. Let us look at some future storage industry trends. CIOs and IT managers are still playing very cautious as economic recovery is on cards. At the same time, a survey conducted in Jan 2010 by Baird Technology Research indicated that storage was the number one area of IT spend in 2010, followed by virtualisation. Another recent survey from Goldman Sachs in Nov, 2009 showed pent-up demand for storage in 2010 much ahead of PCs and servers. At the same time, organisations have three key concerns apart from security and privacy to manage this information growth and avoid an implosion: how to keep costs down even as data grows; how to manage complexity in their information and virtual infrastructures; and how to comply effectively with internal organisational policies, IT governance and government requirements.

Virtualisation adoption is picking up speed as organisations are moving from physical to virtual infrastructure

Virtualisation adoption is picking up speed as organisations are moving from physical to virtual infrastructure. Virtualisation is making hardware a software, you can fly your servers anywhere in the IT infrastructure. It saves a lot of costs in terms of servers, licenses, power, cooling, space, etc., but, if not planned correctly, makes the management and backup complex. Cloud computing was largely a topic for discussion in 2009 but is becoming a reality in 2010 with all the big vendors in the fray. A key requirement for cloud computing is cloud storage, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud. Few have started experimenting in this area but the expectation is that in 2010, 90 percent will use private cloud and 10 percent public cloud, while some will use a mix of the two. This mix will change in future as security and data migration concerns disappear. This is the biggest IT wave in the last sixty years; bigger than the previous mainframe, mini, personal computers and network/distributed computing waves. Solid state disk and SAS disks are causing waves in the market. Information Life Cycle (ILM) has been

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

BY I N V I T A T I O N

T I E R E D S T O R AG E

talked about a lot in the last six-seven years. Now, with automated tiering of data built into storage boxes to move data between solid state disk, fibre channel disks and SATA disks based on the application requirements, the cost is coming down and the service levels are improving. Another technology which is really going to help the organisations is data deduplication. As organisations keep multiple copies of the data for long period of time, removing redundancy at the sub-block level within the files and across servers and organisation will make for a killer app. It brings with it real savings in terms of power consumption and cooling as it essentially means less storage to take care of. Also, advantages such as much faster replication, optimised backup environment and much better manageability. Great technology to bet on. Other areas to watch are e-discovery, as more and more organisations have to comply with regulations and produce digital data for legal cases. As users are looking for better Return on Investments (ROI) and

lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to manage their ever growing information infrastructure, interoperability is a crucial factor, specially for heterogeneous environments. There is a lot of pressure to standardise storage technologies, just as was the case with Internet technologies in 1990s. There are many benefits to be gained from the development of standards, and from the purchase of products (both hardware and software) that have been built in accordance with standards. Several storage standards are emerging that will help storage administrators manage data more efficiently now and in future. These are T11, iSCSI, FCIP, FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) running on CEE (Converged 10GbE Enhance Ethernet), Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S), T11.5 FAIS (Fabric Application Interface Standard), XAM (eXtensible Access Method). In future FCoE will probably make the most impact. The business benefits of FCoE include reduced cost and complexity, better and flexible performance, and reduced power

consumption—all while providing seamless connectivity with existing Ethernet and storage networks. Some of the new technology innovations that we will see in the coming years are: 1.Using low-energy lasers to grow crystals as a storage medium in salt solutions. It has the potential to hold 100 times more data than current systems. 2.Recently, engineers in NC State University, US have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 TB (terabyte) of data – 50 times the capacity of today's best siliconbased chip technologies that use nanostructured Ni-MgO system. In real terms, it can store up to 20 HD DVDs or 250 million pages of text. 3. Next in line is Storage Class Memory (SCM). SCM is a solid-state memory that blurs the boundaries between storage and memory by being low-cost, fast, and non-volatile. What you are going to see in the next five years will be drastically different from what we have seen in the last 10 years. So prepare for your 1 TB USB drive!

BY INVITATION HUBERT YOSHIDA |

HUBERT YOSHIDA IS VP & CTO Hitachi Data Systems, and is responsible for defining the technical direction for Hitachi Data Systems.

New Considerations for Tiered Storage. Adopting the right technology to implement

tiered storage is important to get maximum benefits. TIERED storage is one of those terms which people use freely and assume that everyone understands. The basic concept is that you can reduce the cost of storage by assigning your data to different cost tiers of storage depending on the requirements of the data. However, there are different technologies to address tiered storage. The technology you choose can make a great deal of difference in the value or benefits that can be derived. In fact some implementations of tiered storage

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

may end up causing more complexity and cost. Here are a number of considerations which may be helpful. Often I hear people talk about assigning data to tiers of storage based upon the “value” of the data, and they go through a very complicated study to classify the data by “value”. Some companies have spent several years on the classification of data and never finish. First, I would say that all data is valuable or you shouldn’t be keeping it. Secondly I would separate out

F U T U R E O F S T O R AG E

primary data from replicated data. Replicas are growing faster than primary data since we cannot afford to stop applications today to do backups, development/test, data transformation, data mining, data distribution, and disaster recovery, etc. Rather than disrupt the application server to make these copies, it is simpler to have the storage systems make those copies, especially if we want a consistent copy across a group of related volumes. These copies do not have to be on the same tier of storage as the primary data. With storage virtualisation you can snap them off to lower cost tiers of storage in the same storage system or to lower cost, externally attached, storage systems. There are also technologies to reduce the time and capacity required for making copies such as copy on write and dynamic (thin) provisioning. Another way to classify a tier is by performance. This makes sense if there is a significant difference in price/ performance between the storage tiers. As you can imagine, the differences in performance and cost per GB between different types of storage media can be very significant. There are performance differences in rotation speed and RAID mapping which may make a difference for some types of workloads that are assigned to static tiers, but these differences may not justify the work to dynamically move data up and down tiers of storage on a frequent basis.

Today, movement of data between tiers of storage is done by volumes or files, and moving large volumes and files is a very heavy workload that you might not want to do on a frequent basis. You can start by allocating a volume to a mid tier of storage initially and if it turns out that it needs need higher performance you can promote it to a higher performance tier with storage virtualisation. Storage virtualisation forgives you if you happen to make a bad choice with your initial allocation. Data centres that implement disaster recovery classify applications on the basis of RPO/RTO and assign critical application data to storage systems which have the capability to do distance replication for business continuity. Typically if an application must recover in hours, it uses enterprise storage to do synchronous and/or asynchronous replication. Here again we can use dynamic (thin) provisioning to reduce the time and capacity needed for replication. With the price and performance differences that we see today between flash drives, FC/SAS disks, and large capacity SATA disks, the benefits of tiered storage have become very compelling. Storage virtualisation makes it easy to copy, move, and replicate data between internal and external tiers of storage without disrupting the applications. Additional services like copy on write, and dynamic (thin) provisioning can decrease the workload needed to do the tiering.

BY I N V I T A T I O N

"Moving large volumes and files is a very heavy workload that you might not want to do on a frequent basis"

Author: Stephen Green

HIDE TIME | BOOK REVIEW

“The individual has been effectively replaced by the consumer”

Good Over Greed. Can maximising

returns on capital and caring for posterity go hand in hand? Stephen Green makes us ponder.

IN TODAY'S world, ‘responsible financing’ is as much an oxymoron as a ‘godly banker’ – and yet Stephen Green presents us both in his book Good Value: Reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world. Green is a graduate of Oxford and MIT, an ordained priest in the Church of England, and currently group chairman of HSBC Holdings. As he readily admits, he views the world through a Christian prism, but it’s a learned, long-term, and liberal one. Good Value discusses how our society has become more complex in terms of trade, culture, and geopolitical relations, bringing with it more choice. However, the flip side of that is less certainty and more insecurity. This has resulted in apathy and cynicism. Green says that with “the commercialization of everything”, “the individual has been effectively replaced by the consumer”. Green acts as our social conscience, reminding us that we have a duty beyond ourselves. In a world of marginalized peoples, extreme disparities in wealth, and concerns of climate change, he calls for responsible commerce and tempered consumerism.

“Capitalism for the 21st century needs to discover a fundamentally renewed morality to underpin it.” For businesses, Green espouses the goal of ‘sustainable value maximization’, broken down into four points: Earn the best possible sustainable return on capital. Nurture customer relationships and service. Show employees how their work contributes to society. Show the public how the company is contributing to the common good. The book blends economics, philosophy, and literature to deal with big questions such as ‘What is progress?’, ‘Are we doing something worthwhile?’, and ‘Why should I do anything for posterity?’ Green quotes numerous luminaries to bolster his arguments, including T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, and, most tellingly, Goethe’s Faust. In the chapter titled ‘The Global Bazaar’, Green gives an excellent history of globalization, showing our innate and long-term drive for commerce. He refutes Thomas Friedman’s flat world idea as generalized and simplistic, and prefers French philosopher/priest/palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and businesss/ academic editor, based in Delhi. She has also contributed to the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Mint. Details are available on LinkedIn: http:// in.linkedin.com/ pub/ranjaniiyer-mohanty/ a/51a/48b .

view, hoping for our evolution as ascension from matter to spirit, from separateness to union. Surprisingly, given the recent economic crisis, there are few books on banking and morality. There are however more on business and ethics, but only a handful of recent ones and none as popular as Good Value. What gives this book more credibility is Stephen Green himself. He also walks the talk. At the HSBC shareholders meeting last year, in spite of having weathered the financial storm quite well, he said this: "Underlying all these events is a question about the culture and ethics of the industry. It is as if, too often, people had given up asking whether something was the right thing to do, and focused only on whether it was legal and complied with the rules." And he refused his cash bonus in 2008. At its heart – and it has a big one – this book is a call to action, to rise above and beyond ourselves, as individuals and as business people, think of the greater good, and create a more “responsible vision for life in the global bazaar.” —Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

NO HOLDS BARRE D

XXXXXXX

Research in

ACTION

Russ Owen, President of Computer Sciences Corporation’s (CSC) Managed Services Portfolio, in a discussion with Sana Khan, shares his views on the myths around cloud, the importance of outsourcing and CSC’s quest for innovation. Excerpts:

CSC has many firsts to its credit: designing the first automated air cargo system at London’s Heathrow in 1968, the first webbased tax filing system in Denmark and so on. What motivates the people in CSC? Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) started when the first computers were delivered on flatbed trucks and we wrote the operating system (OS) on the compilers. We gave the industry its name. There was no computer science department in universities before our company was formed. So, this is the kind of spirit that CSC grew up with before entering the commercial and public sector businesses. We have a heritage of valuing technology and innovation. CSC has the ‘Leading Edge’ forum for research and we publish technology trends irrespective of whether those technologies are being produced by us or not. This has been in place for the last 40 years. We predicted a lot

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

RUS S OWE N

of technology shifts in our ‘Disruptive Technologies Report’. We have a lot of people who continuously research these trends. What are these trends? Are these practical, usable technologies? Have you been able to pinpoint? Our R&D recognises these trends and the Leading Edge forum, which develops solutions, recommends them internally and to our clients. For example, the consumerisation of cloud. Cloud is more hype than reality. Same is true for “on-demand computing” and other things. A lot of CIOs don’t understand the cyber threat. A lot of software that the service providers offer can provide a good level-one security. However, security that is based on detecting the signature of the text and other product-based security is not robust enough because a professional hacker does not come in with

DOSSIER NAME: Russ Owen DESIGNATION: President, Managed Services Sector ORGANISATION: CSC PRESENT JOB ROLE: President of CSC's Managed Services Sector with global responsibilities PREVIOUS JOB ROLE: President of CSC's Global Infrastructure Services Group

"I don't think we will see the day when a CIO will put the company’s proprietary information in the public infrastructure"

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

a signature so you really need to be thoughtful about being intrinsically secure. If your phone directory is stolen, it would affect your business in a limited way. But if your pricing table is stolen, it would hurt your business a lot. So you make relative judgements about the value of information and you apply an architecture design that recognises the value and moves things at relatively lowrisk into the public infrastructure and the high-risk ones in the private infrastructure. So, in a way, you are suggesting the hybrid-cloud approach? I think we will have the hybrid could environment for the next one decade. I don't think you and I will ever see the day where a CIO will put all of the company’s proprietary information in the public infrastructure. We are working on some projects like ‘Jericho’ with an assumption that someday the world will have a common identity and a common authentication standard. Some day we will have the ability to detect non-signature based attacks. To have a sustainable solution, do you also work with application providers? We have good relationships with some of the top vendors. It often happens that we customise a solution using their products and then trade it back to the vendor as a ‘hosted offering’ or that we license our products though them. You can see that with SAP and Oracle. They are offering some of our banking and insurance products. We sometimes collaborate in the future evolution of products because we do not want to be in the software business but need the capability. Similarly, in security, we have relationships with some suppliers and there is considerable sharing of information. We value our independence and ensure that we are not a mere channel for suppliers' products.

NO HOLDS BARRE D

How would you differentiate yourself from some of the large local Indian companies with a global presence specially as their offerings are cheaper? We had our roots in systems integration so we have always prized our programme management, global enterprise management and security management skills. Even the tierone providers in the global industry can’t match our level of expertise and depth. The combination of large scale programme management and service integration and global service model are really good competitive edges. How did you sustain your pricing and the premium you charged in the last two years of recession? Our relationships with clients are really like marriages. We are embedded in their business. When they were going through the downturn, we were helping them cut operation costs. There was a shift from projectbased discretionary spending to reengineering of applications portfolios, virtualisation and consolidation, more offshoring etc. We helped our clients bring down costs and stay competitive. In a down market scenario, we say to our clients that you need to modernise your portfolio and pay for it (the modernising) from the savings generated. Now that is a value proposition for the client. Can you give an example to substantiate? In a large automotive company, we started with a bid to virtualise their servers, desktops, etc. but as we stepped in we saw that the storage was not being used very efficiently. We gave a proposition to virtualise their storage and drive their capital cost down by half by bringing in efficiencies. The customer was very satisfied with us and we have since collaborated with it in other areas as well.

LITTLE GIANTS

CARZONRENT

Rajesh Munjal Head IT, Carzonrent

COMPANY DASHBOARD COMPANY NAME Carzonrent (India) Pvt. Ltd. BUSINESS: Easy Cabs Hertz Operating Lease Hertz Car Rental LOCATIONS 13 cities FLEET Total of 5000 cars (in all 3 businesses) REVENUE (2009-10) Approx 200 crore HEAD IT Rajesh Munjal

IN THE DRIVERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SEAT Deploying a home-grown, self-

tested fleet management system helped Carzonrent to drastically cut down the turnaround time for customer queries BY SANA KHAN

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

CEO Rajiv K Vij

In the service industry, pleasing a customer can be tough. Providing a wide range of choice in the services offered has been a tried and tested strategy to woo customers. But how do you appease an impatient customer? When sales executives at Carzonrent, one of Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s topmost car renting companies, sat with their clients to provide them a car leasing plan tailored to their needs, they often took upto half a day to submit a proposal. Client preferences with regard to the specifics of the cars to be leased required the sales team to feed the data into a program that processed the data and came out with a result. Half a day is enough for a car to roll hundreds of miles or a customer to turn sullen. The IT team at Carzonrent developed a Fleet Management System (FMS) solution to get past such delays in processing customer requirements. The in-house developed Leasesoft, is an end-to-end solution to the car leasing

CARZONRENT

business of Carzonrent, that not only given its customers the flexibility to instantly choose from a wide spectrum of available vehicles, but also provides a host of leasing options. The FMS has helped in reducing the turnaround time to a customer query by 90 percent and all operations of the company have now been centralised.

Clearing the roadblocks There were two reason for developing a FMS in Carzonrent Firstly, the leasing business of Carzonrent is expanding rapidly. Using the manual processes caused a lot of wastage of time and thus a webbased system, which could be used across the country and which could be accessible from remote locations, was the need of the hour. Accessing information regarding different permutations and combinations of available cars is critical to the sales deparment. In the absence of a comprehensive and automated tool for generating multiple options for the clients, the pace of business was sluggish. The sales team could only revert to the client/s after manually checking the inventories and creating suitable options. Secondly, without such a system, monitoring the maintenance of cars and checking the servicing obligations was a nightmare. “The nature of the business demands that we keep a constant check on the condition of the vehicles to avoid drastic depreciation of the asset. It was also very important to keep the cost of the infrastructure bare minimum,” says Rajesh Munjal, Head IT, Carzonrent. Before designing the FMS, Carzonrent was using a FoxPro-based manual system. It worked on Windows platform and client-server architecture. The system, however, could not be accessed from remote/field locations and didn’t allow for consolidation of information. All factors related to vehicle leasing had to be manually fed into the system which then came out with feasible options for the clients. The manual collation of information meant that the response to the client was slow. The turnaround time was severely impacted even when there was a minor change in the proposals and offers. A number of readymade fleet management systems were available in the market. “However, none of them were meeting our requirements of generating customer quotations and managing the fleet at the same time,” Munjal points out. The solutions available in the market were either addressing the fleet management or the leasing aspect. The need to integrate the two functions became even more pronounced in the wake of a recessionary economy and a geographically expanding business.

LITTLE GIANTS

for all the departments in the business — from sales to operations to finance. The core team worked for six months to develop and test Lease Soft, now a proprietary solution of Carzonrent. The process began with identifying the key business challenges including quote generation, service reminders, availability of services, etc. “It was important that the team had a good overview of the business and understood the exigencies involved. Building a solution for a business like ours was not so easy,” says Munjal. With the requirements drawn out, the software development team started work. The solution was built using a Microsoft .Net platform. “The initial coding phase took a lot of time as there were a lot of bugs to be fixed.” “The application is far more stable now. It is running without any problems in all the 68 cities where he have operations. All client acquisition and servicing transactions, fleet management, dealer management etc. are taken care of by Lease Soft,” says Munjal. The devlopment required an investment of Rs. 28 lakhs, which Munjal estimated would be recovered over a period of two years. “The implementation has been so successful that we were able to recover the costs in just six months from its deployment,” he claims.

THE SOLUTIONS IN THE MARKET WERE EITHER ADDRESSING THE FLEET MANAGEMENT OR THE LEASING ASPECT, NOT BOTH.

Passing the bend A 12-member team, with Munjal at the helm, took on the challenge of designing an integrated solution which could be a one-stop-shop

Enjoying the drive Karunesh Arya, COO, Carzonrent is extremely satisfied with the FMS. Arya says that there were many requirements in connection with the commercial vehicles — maintaining the logs regarding the fitness check, getting the road permits, processing the service statements, updating the billing status etc. “Lease Soft not only gives this information in real time, it also helps in effective utilisation of information by all departments. It is user-friendly from all aspects and has considerably reduced the complexities associated with the fleet management business,” says Arya. Another major benefit of the system is the ease with which a small, core operations team can use it efficiently. It is now possible for just eight people, based in major cities, to carry out operations spread in 68 cities. “The availability of data related to revenue and expenses makes the cost versus spending analysis simple. The constant comparison keeps the costs low and makes it less challenging to take corrective actions,” says Munjal. In future, Munjal has plans of extending some capabilities of the software so that regular customers of the company can generate quotations on their own. “This will not only reduce the manpower required, but the ease and transparency of the process will also go a long way in winning customer confidence,” he says. —sana.khan@9dot9.in

CTO FORUM thectoforum.com

21 FEBRUARY 2010

VIEWPOINT BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI |

Avoiding Enterprise Software Vendor Lock-In. Keep the Core System vendor on its toes!

LARGE enterprises rely on software products. And as everything else in large enterprises, the software products are large, complex, cumbersome and nearly unchangeable. This last attribute is better known as vendor lock-in. Software vendors love vendor lock-in. Here is a definition borrowed from Wikipedia: Vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

The problem Vendor lock-in exists in most large enterprise verticals like telco, healthcare, finance and energy. Such industries rely heavily on certain computer systems or software products, usually dubbed Core Systems. Because most of the business transactions, logic and information are stored and processed by these Core

Systems, the transition to a different Core System vendor is extremely costly and time consuming. So most large enterprise companies simply continue to operate with the same Core System vendor, while they suffer: delays in patch or version delivery poor quality product versions inadequate compliance from the Core System to their local law and regulations ever increasing maintenance costs. On the other hand, switching to another Core System vendor will result in probably the same end effect, with the added costs of the switchover.

The solution So is there a way to improve your position? Indeed there is, but with a radical move: there is only one thing that any software vendor reacts to — risk of decrease in earnings from a customer. To make this risk a reality for the vendor, the customer needs to

CTO FORUM 21 FEBRUARY 2010

thectoforum.com

ABOUT BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI: Bozidar Spirovski is an information security expert with Information Security Short Takes

reach a situation where competitors can successfully bid for software upgrades and new functionality without actually switching the Core System. This is most easily achieved through the Core System’s API interface. Most Core Systems have extensive Application Programming Interfaces (API), which can be used to exchange data with the Core System or issue commands to it. So instead of asking for every possible modification or new functionality from the Core System vendor, just use it as a processing core — move everything else to other developers, which will need to adhere to the Core System API specifications. This way you can outsource the development of a lot of applications to other vendors, achieve better response from everyone and always have healthy competition. Oh, and it will keep the Core System vendor on its toes!