Storage Special

S E L ECT

VOL 02 | ISSUE 07 FEBRUARY 2010 | RS. 50 A 9.9 MEDIA PUBLICATION

S E R IES

STORAGE SPECIAL New technologies like data deduplication, storage virtualisation and cloud storage are simplifying storage management and bringing new products to the market

Storage Virtualisation

Most companies in India are still evaluating the benefits PAGE 14

Solid State Drives

Businesses like it for its many advantages but the costs are still high PAGE 17

Data Deduplication

The technology is helping reduce storage costs and increase efficiency PAGE 25

editorial

The Data Prelude

H sanjay.gupta@9dot9.in

Companies are not shying away from empowering their employees with as much storage space as they need

eard of data deluge? I’m sure you’d have not only heard and spoken of it countless times but are probably as sick of the clichÊ as I am.

But, wait a minute, I didn’t mean I don’t want more storage. In fact, take my order for that new terabyte hard disk, this new sleek external drive, three of those ultra-mini high-capacity thumbs and a few packs of dual-layer DVDs! Not all customers are as forthcoming with their purchases, I know, but most of them are going to be – as many of you in the IT business already realise.

So, while the clichĂŠ of huge amounts of data engulfing individuals and businesses has been around for quite some time, it is now actually coming true. We are really, really going to be drowning in bits and bytes.

Consider a few numbers. This year humankind will create 1,200 exabytes of data – an eight-fold increase against the 150 exabytes generated in 2005 (one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes).

More than two billion USB devices are sold worldwide each year. The popular website Twitter is set to cross 10 billion tweets.

Today, more and more people are clicking digital pictures, making videos, interacting online and, of course, computing as a matter of routine than ever before. This trend of consumer-led data boom is fairly nascent in India – but the amount of data

Indian users produce should explode once broadband reaches a critical mass.

Even in the business world, data storage is becoming more or less a given. Gone are the days of limiting each user’s quota of space to a handful of megabytes.

Companies are not shying away from empowering their employees with as much storage space as they need – though they are certainly getting smarter at squeezing more juice out of the storage boxes they have invested in. Many are looking at more integration and management control over where and how their data is stored, accessed and backed up.

Needless to say, these trends will mean a huge market for a multiplicity of devices to store a growing stockpile of data. And that will not be all: there will be a stronger need for backup and management services as well – both online and offline.

Data deluge is no longer sickening – it’s happening.

SANJAY GUPTA Editor Digit Channel Connect

sounding board sounding board VOL 02 | ISSUE 07 FEBRUARY 2010 | RS. 50 A 9.9 MEDIA PUBLICATION

SE L ECT

S E RIE S

STORAGE SPECIAL New technologies like data deduplication, storage virtualisation and cloud storage are simplifying storage management and bringing new products to the market

Storage Virtualisation

Solid State Drives

Data Deduplication

Most companies in India are still evaluating the benefits PAGE 14

Businesses like it for its many advantages but the costs are still high PAGE 17

The technology is helping reduce storage costs and increase efficiency PAGE 25

Write to the Editor E-mail: editor@digitchannelconnect.com Snail Mail: The Editor, Digit Channel Connect, K-40, Connaught Circus, New Delhi 110 001

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contents VOL 02 ISSUE 07 | FEBRUARY 2010

Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh EDITORIAL Editor: Sanjay Gupta Sr. Correspondents: Charu Khera (Delhi), Soma Tah (Mumbai)

STORAGE SPECIAL

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 BRAND COMMUNICATION Product Manager: Ankur Agarwal

New technologies like data deduplication,

SALES & MARKETING VP Sales & Marketing: Navin Chand Singh National Manager - Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623) Business Manager (Engagement Platforms) Arvind Ambo (09819904050) National Manager - Channels: Krishnadas Kurup (09322971866) 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)

storage virtualisation and cloud storage are simplifying storage management and bringing new products to the market

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PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Sr. GM Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari, Shashi Shekhar Singh

PORTABLE STORAGE

GREEN STORAGE MAKE STORAGE GREEN Energy efficiency in storage infrastructure can bring real gains to enterprises, besides helping them cut down on carbon emissions

THE EVOLUTION OF PORTABLE STORAGE

TAPE STORAGE

Over the years, portable storage devices have evolved in terms of form factor, pricing, capacity as well as performance.

CLOUD STORAGE

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CLOUD STORAGE: YET TO TAKE OFF The service is still evolving and is yet to make it to the priority list of businesses.

REQUIREMENTS CONTINUE TO DRIVE THE TAPE MARKET

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REGULARS EDITORIAL ......................................................... 03 TRENDS ............................................................. 06 ANALYST SPEAK ................................................ 28

ADVERTISERS INDEX Siemens ............................................... Inside Front Cover Western Digital ...............................................Back Cover IBM ......................................................Inside Back Cover IBM ...............................................................................5

GUEST EXPRESSION FUTURE OF THE STORAGE INDUSTRY Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to be a concern for most enterprises.

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CHANNEL CHAMPS Sr Co-ordinator - Events: Rakesh Sequeira Events Executives: Pramod Jadhav, Johnson Noronha Audience Dev. Executive: Aparna Bobhate, Shilpa Surve OFFICE ADDRESS

Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd., KPT House, Plot 41/13, Sector 30, Vashi, Navi Mumbai - 400 703 Phone: 40789666 Fax: 022-40789540, 022-40789640 Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. C/O KPT House, Plot 41/13, Sector 30, Vashi (Near Sanpada Railway Station), Navi Mumbai 400703 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur C/O KPT House, Plot 41/13, Sector 30, Vashi (Near Sanpada Railway Station), Navi Mumbai 400703

Kingston ........................................................................7 Mach Data .....................................................................9 In-house ad..................................................................11 Supermicro/Mega .........................................................15 Strontium INDIA ...........................................................19 EDU 2010 ....................................................................20 In-house ad..................................................................23

Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd, TTC Ind. Area, Plot No. : A - 403, MIDC, Mahape, Navi Mumbai - 400709

trends

S E L E C T

S E R I E S

IBM unveils clustered NAS storage The new offering is a hardware-based expansion of its ‘Scale Out File Services’

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ntel IBM has announced i t s e n t r y i n t h e g r ow ing 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 hard-

ware-based expansion of its ‘Scale Out File Services’ and is based on the General Parallel File System (GPFS). The Sambabased 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

Sify forays in cloud storage Company offers on-demand, scalable storage powered by Hitachi

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ify Technologies recently announced the launch of its innovative 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, utility 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.

Companies can now rely on Sify for a unified storage pool (SAN / NAS), for their applications needs, ranging from the most demanding database environment to secondary backup needs. The services is accessible on both public and private cloud, is user controlled, highly scalable and is 99.99 percent SLA driven and the companies will charged based on their utilization.

Sify’s four data centre is currently operational and by October 2010 its fifth data centre (around 130,000 sq. feet) in the National Capital Region will be ready.

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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.

ILM and storage management capabilities include file protection policies at creation, migration and deletion policies, and replication, backup and archiving

features. IBM also claims ease of installation, monitoring and management for the NAS systems.

IBM is currently testing applications with SONAS, including Symantec and IBM Tivoli backup, VMware ESX and Oracle RAC. IBM said the systems address “one of the key promises of cloud computing, which is to provide access to information anywhere at any time.”

Seagate optimistic about storage market Celebrating completion of 30 years, Seagate looks forward to a positive 2010

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elebrating completion of 30 years, Seagate has announced that it looks forward to a very positive 2010 riding on revival of economies Asia Pacific region especially India and China. BS Teh, Executive Vice President and Managing Director - Asia Pacific & Japan, Seagate informed that the company is the only hard disc manufacturer to have achieved shipment volume of 1 billion drives in 2008 and is still the only HDD company to have crossed this landmark and said that it would achieve the next 1 billion within the next five years, riding on the back of explosive requirement for storage both at enterprise and consumer levels.

The company also projected positive outlook for the storage industry in 2010 and expects the growing digital lifestyles and exploding enterprise data to drive growth. Seagate also announced that Asia-Pacific and Japan contribute almost half of the company’s revenue. It is predicted that enterprise data will grow by over six times over next 4-5 years. With applications like SMS (the number of text messages sent every single day, which is currently, about 6.5 billion that is more than population on earth) and other communication and

entertainment devices, already the HDD commissions 1.5 million drives every day. Seagate anticipates that 40 exabytes of new information will be generated in this year globally, while traffic on the world-wide-web would grow at 40 percent CAGR over the same period. All this usage requires storage at the backend.

As per the company, India is key player of Seagate’s growth strategy as anticipated investment in IT infrastructure, of which storage is a key component, pick up pace. Indian enterprises will be looking to rationalising their storage with adoption of newer technologies like storage virtualisation, de-duplication, thin provisioning, thin cloning, data storage is well on the way to recovery. Seagate is confident that as the technology and market leader, it is well poised to be at the forefront of this potential market.

trends

S E L E C T

Buffalo launches DriveStation HD-HXU3 external HDDs Comes with built-in SuperSpeed USB 3.0; is compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0 and is imbibed with Google Picasa

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uf falo has unveiled DriveStation HD-HXU3 series in India. It offers USB technology with a transfer rate of up to 5Gbps. As per the company, with plugand-play installation, an easy configuration wizard, and eco power management, this DriveStation is easy to use and manage.

This Buffalo Drivestation is loaded with SuperSpeed USB 3.0, which provides accelerated file access and transfer speeds and is compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0. The TurboUSB Performance copies files faster and increase productivity. Also, it is imbibed with Google Picasa that helps to organise and share photos online. There is no requirement to install any drivers onto it before use. It has an Intelligent Temperature Control system in the form of variable speed fan that adjusts speed based on the internal temperature of the hard drive to keep the unit cool and prolongs its life span. The DriveStation also has a power saving mode. It has the feature of taking backups of all the valued data Memeo AutoBackup for Windows and Macintosh. The Cross-Platform Support lets it connect to USB on any PC or Mac for a seamless integration.

This product is available in the all the LFRs and major resellers and 1TB HD-HX1.0TU3 is available for Rs 18,000; 5TB HD-HX1.5TU3 for Rs 26,000 and 2TB HD-HX2.0TU3 for Rs 44,000.

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S E R I E S

WD launches new My Passport Studio portable drives Features FireWire 800 interface and a customizable e-label smart display

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D has introduced its new My Passport Studio portable drives featuring fast FireWire 800 interface and a customizable e-label that’s always visible, even when the drive is unplugged.

Sporting a sleek and stylish design, the drives are formatted for Mac computers, compatible with Apple TimeMachine software, and feature automatic and continuous backup with WD SmartWare software, and 256-bit hardware-based encryption. Available now at select retailers, the new My Passport Studio drives are offered in capacities of 320 GB, 500 GB and 640 GB. WD’s My Passport Studio drives are designed for creative professionals and Mac enthusiasts.

Their production and use of many large files require the fast transfers from computer to My Passport Studio drives that FireWire 800 provides. Professionals such as photographers also benefit from the e-labeling system to effectively organise their work.

The e-label smart display on the front of the My Passport drives can be changed as often as desired using the included WD SmartWare software. Users can easily create a label to personalize their drive or remind themselves of its contents. The e-label also shows available capacity and whether the drive is locked. Utilizing e-paper technology, the information on the display remains clearly visible, even when the drive is unplugged.

M y Pa s s p o r t S t u d i o drives also feature userselected password protection combined with 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which scrambles files before they are stored. Typically found only on much more expensive drive systems, the encryption acts as a virtual padlock to keep users’ data safe.

The new My Passport Studio drives are offered in capacities 500 GB and 640 GB and have a three-year limited warranty. They are priced at Rs 9,600 for 500GB and Rs 10,750 for 640GB.

Seagate unveils 2.5-inch hard drive Suitable for ultra-portable and entry-level laptops, high-end netbooks, backup devices and consumer electronics

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eagate Technology has announced the Momentus Thin drive, a 2.5-inch hard disk drive for ultra-portable and entrylevel laptops, high-end netbooks, backup devices and consumer electronics. It is 7mm in height and the company claims that it is 25 percent slimmer than traditional 9.5mm 2.5-inch laptop hard drives.

Hitachi has further claimed that of all netbook computers available today, 90 percent feature 9.5mm 2.5-inch laptop drives because solid state and 1.8-inch hard drives are largely cost-prohibitive for this market. The Momentus Thin drive provides affordable, thin storage for netbooks and slim laptops, enabling computer makers to offer systems that reach a broader market.

The Momentus Thin drive features two capacity points – 250GB and 160GB – an 8MB cache, a Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and a 5400RPM spin speed. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate’s OEM and integrator partners in January 2010.

trends

S E L E C T

S E R I E S

Kingmax unveils Class 10 micro SDHC card

Sony expands memory card offerings

Complies with SD 2.0 standard and comes bundled with a SD adaptor

Launches SD/MicroSD cards and plans to capture 35 percent share in SD card market by 2010-11

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o celebrate its 20th anniversary, Kingmax has announced the launch of 4GB SD2.0 compliant micro SDHC memory card. As per the company, the high-speed Class 10 microSDHC card is a response to the increasing demand of memory storage for smart-phone usage.

The memory card complies to Class 10 speed standards, of fering guaranteed write speeds of at least 16MB/s to ensure device remains quick and responsive while saving, copying, recording or viewing files on the go. For added convenience, Kingmax currently offers a combo package that includes a microSDHC card bundled with a SD adaptor to make transferring data easier.

Or the alternative is to purchase Kingmax CR-04 microSD card reader, just simply remove the microSDHC card from cell phone, insert the card into the reader, the reader works just like a standard USB flash drive.

PRODUCT SPECIFICATION: z Capacity : 4GB/8GB /16GB z Dimension : 15mm * 11mm *

1mm z Complies with SD 2.0 standard. z Endurance : 5,000 times. z Data Retention : 10 years. z Weight : 2gm. z Seamless speed and perfor-

mance with micro SDHC compatible devices. z Tested under the most extreme conditions. z Lifetime limited warranty.

A-Data launches Portable HDD CH94

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The same is available as a simple download which is free of cost.

Then there’s x-Pict story, which lets you combine your choice of music with your favorite pictures to create outstanding slideshows Priced between Rs 600 to Rs 1,500, the new range of memory cards will be available across all Sony Center stores.

D-Link introduces all-in-one router Xtreme N DIR-685 comes with built-in digital photo frame, Internet content player and FTP server

D -Data Technology has introduced a Portable HDD - the CH94. As per the company, resembling the shape of a notebook, the ergonomic streamlined enclosure of CH94 gives a smooth touch to consumers. With the thickness just less than 20mm and the built-in wrap-around USB cable, CH94 is neatly designed to fit right in the pocket.

Users can also to personalize their own CH94 with the self-adhesive letter stickers that come with the package. This unique DIY feature makes CH94 a fun hard drive to play with. The smooth surface of CH94 enclosure allows users to decorate the drive freely with their own original creativity.

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ony launched a range of SD/SDHC and microSD/ microSDHC cards, which can be used in cameras, mobile phones and laptops. The new range of memory cards are all class-4-speed for high-definition recording and include benefits like x-Pict story and File Rescue software.

It offers Class 4 data transfer speed means stable HD Video recording and better speed to cope with the advanced functions of compact digital cameras. Sony’s SD/SDHC memory card range features storage capacity of up to 32GB, while the microSD/microSDHC memory cards are able to store up to 8GB of data.

With the Powerful File Rescue software, you can retrieve photos, videos, or music files that were damaged or deleted by mistake.

-Link has introduced all-in-one home network router that combines powerful 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity with network attached storage (NAS), USB devicesharing, digital photo frame, Internet content player, FTP server and Green technology in a sleek, compact desktop design.

The D-Link Xtreme N DIR-685 sports a stylish upright design for easy viewing of the vibrant 3.2-inch LCD screen powered by FrameChannel that displays device status via graphical gauges, and serves as a digital photo frame by showing digital photos, streamed video, weather forecasts and other live streaming Internet content in up to 1.6 million colors. Frame content is simple to manage at internetphotoframe.com.

The network attached storage (NAS) feature supports both UPnP server functions and BitTorrent downloads with the ability to store

up to 1 terabyte of data on a 2.5-inch SATA drive that mounts easily into the side of the DIR-685. A built-in FTP server allows users to access documents, photos, music and other media locally through the home network or remotely across the Internet.

The DIR-685 includes two USB ports enabled with D-Link’s unique SharePort technology, allowing multiple users to wirelessly share USB devices such as multi-function printers (MFP), scanners, and external hard drives, from virtually anywhere in the home or office. It also features Gigabit ports for fast wire transfers.

D-Link DIR-685 will be available for Rs 15,000.

portable storage

THE EVOLUTION OF

PORTABLE STORAGE

Over the years, portable storage devices have evolved in terms of form factor, pricing, capacity as well as performance.

Charu Khera

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torage of data is, and will continue to be, a mission-critical task for any enterprise, be it large or small. Nonetheless, the storage market in India today is a complex weave of technologies.

Only about a decade back, all devices that stored data were huge in physical size, but stored only limited amounts of data. Today, however, technological breakthroughs in storage have increased device portability through a substantial reduction in the size of the device.

The most popular among storage devices today are flash drives, often referred to as USB drives. Then, there are external 2.5-inch hard drives, which are also called portable hard disks; followed by memory cards (that come in various formats). All three variants are available in different capacities, sizes, as well as transfer speeds.

Some of the leading players in the portable storage market are: Seagate,

Western Digital, Hitachi, Transcend, Kingston, SanDisk, Toshiba, A-Data and Iomega.

Explaining the key storage trends in 2010, Sushil Bandi, Country Manager, Western Digital said, “2010 will see more consumers drifting towards products that can help them carry more data such as music, videos or photos. We will also see the launch of products with higher capacity, higher RPM, higher data transfer rates and lower failure rates on the internal as well external product line.�

USB Flash Drives The flash drive came into existence in the year 2000, with a capacity as low as 8 MB. Developed by IBM, it consisted of a flash memory data storage device integrated with the USB interface. Following the trend and looking at the potential of growth in the category, many storage vendors launched a wide array of USB drives.

STORAGE SPECIAL Flash drives today come in capacities ranging from 1 GB to as high as 16 GB. These drives are also called thumb drives, jump drives, pen drives, key drives, or tokens. Af fordable prices, easy portability (as they are small enough to be carried in your pocket or wallet), and the ease of use that comes from a USB interface have made these the most popular portable storage devices in the Indian market today. The market, therefore, is flooded with USB drives, which come in different shapes, sizes and even attractive colours and designs.

Going a step further, Kingston has launched USB drives with very high capacities – 128 GB and 256 GB. Sharing more insights on this, Nathan Su, Flash Memory - Sales Director, APAC Region, Kingston says, “The pen drive today is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous IT product. With the increase in demand for digital data storage requirements, coupled with extensive mobility associated with modern day-to-day business life, the demand for external and portable storage media has been growing rapidly. Today, the entry-level capacity for a flash drive is 2GB/4GB, which constitutes about 80 percent of the total market share. The demand for high-capacity pen drives, too, is increasing. That is why Kingston has launched DataTraveler 310 256 GB USB drive. Consumers can also expect pen drives with capacity of 1 TB in the future.”

Kingston’s move is a manifestation of a key trend in this category – the increase in storage capacity. With 256 GB already available, USB drives with 500 GB capacity can be expected in 2010.

Another major development is the availability of these USB drives with ReadyBoost feature for Windows Vista and Windows 7, which allows the use of flash drives (up to 4 GB in the case of Windows Vista) to augment operating system memory. In addition, USB drives with backup functionality are also being launched in the market.

For example, Cruzer flash drive by SanDisk has a dedicated backup button.

Another upcoming development in the space is USB 3.0, which has dramatically increased the bandwidth between a computer and the external hard drive.

As per industry watchers, it allows much faster data transfer and better power management over USB 2.0.

Unfortunately, a lot of fake drives are sold in the grey market. They boast of capacities of 32 GB and above; but once they are plugged in, most do not work, or have capacities much lower than what is indicated.

ing, organisations are forced to take a look at its ecological impact. Thus, Green storage is an emerging technology in HDDs. Keeping in mind, Western Digital has launched in India its Caviar Green 2TB hard drive with GreenPower technology, helping user to save power without sacrificing storage capacity.

Portable Hard Drives Laptops have a built-in hard drive; but with the rising amount of data a professional is expected to store, an additional storage device has become the need of the hour. This is where external portable hard disc drives comes in picture. These high-capacity drives are not only a must-have for the corporate world; but they are also becoming popular among the youth, as it helps them store large files such as movies, documents, songs and photos.

These drives have the advantage of being affordable and easy to use.

Suresh, Director of eCaps Computers India (which caters to the South Indian market) says, “Close to 1,000 HDDs are sold in South India alone every month, and we mange selling 250 drives alone. They are increasingly becoming popular among corporate customers, as well as youth, as it helps store data in the most convenient way possible. The simple plug-n-play functionality makes these drives a hot favourite with every laptop user.”

Portable hard drives are 2.5-inch laptop hard drives, which are encased in a disk enclosure with USB/Firewire connectivity. These portable drives can be powered using USB ports directly, as they are not as power-hungry as their 3.5-inch counterparts. What’s more, these hard drives are available in capacities up to 750 GB. There is a lot of competition among manufacturers of these portable drives, with the list including Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Transcend, Iomega, Lacie and Strontium.

Trends in the portable hard drive space are somewhat similar to that of flash drives. Hard drive capacities are increasing; there is USB 3.0 compatibility; and por table hard drives also come with a backup feature.

Another important trend in portable hard drives is the change in looks.

Manufacturers are trying to innovatively design these drives, using different patterns, shapes, sizes and usage indicators to attract the consumer.

Also, with energy costs skyrocketing and the threat of global warm-

cover story

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Memory Cards

The simple plug-n-play functionality of hard disk drives makes them a hot favourite with every laptop user” SURESH , DIRECTOR ECAPS COMPUTERS

2010 will see more consumers drifting towards products that can help them carry more data such as music, videos or photos” SUSHIL BANDI, COUNTRY MANAGER, WESTERN DIGITAL

A memory card is solid-state flash memory data storage, mainly used in phones, MP3 players and cameras.

There is an array of products in the category, such as SD cards, CF cards, XD cards, microSD cards, mini SD cards, memory sticks and so on. Of these, the microSD cards are gradually becoming standard across devices. Users, too, prefer to buy microSD cards and use them on their phones and other devices through various adapters.

Memory cards usually come in capacities of 2 to 4 GB. However, with the introduction of high-capacity cards, also called SDHC cards, many memory cards are available in capacities ranging up to 32 GB. In the memory cards space, there is an increase in the demand and usage of SDHC cards. Another trend is the availability of memory cards with a faster read/write speed. SanDisk’s Xtreme series cards, for instance, read/write at a much faster rate than other cards. These, therefore, are preferred by photographers.

Portable storage devices invite security issues The uncontrolled use of portable storage devices can pose a definite threat to the security and stability of an enterprise. Plugging in a portable device into a PC or network can lead to data theft, introduction of viruses, legal liability issues and much more.

The misuse of por table storage devices in a corporate environment can spell disaster for a corporation.

Though most corporations have understood the repercussions of data theft and have implemented security policies that regulate the use of portable storage devices in the corporate environment, there are many that ignore the repercussions. However, these organisations can adopt several mechanisms or counter-measures to eliminate all threats. charu.khera@9dot9.in

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storage virtualisation

Gearing up for STORAGE VIRTUALISATION Storage virtualisation is not yet high on the agenda for Indian companies.

Suma P

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e h ave n o t m a d e a ny 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

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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.”

STORAGE SPECIAL

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 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.

Why virtualise?

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 NAS and SANs, and multiple boxes, controllers and media, the storage of information often ends being in silos. Reaching the right bit of data quickly frequently ends up being a time consuming process, and companies often set their IT teams to create workarounds to be able to access the data. Migrating data from one storage media to another may be

The next phase of virtualisation adoption will expand beyond servers into infrastructure virtualisation.

Companies will realise the advantages of advanced features for migration and business continuity ” SUBRAM NATARAJAN EXECUTIVE IT CONSULTANT, IBM

cover story

unpracticable in many 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 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

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storage virtualisation without any downtime to the application.”

make optimal use of the available storage space.

Benefits

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 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

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

STORAGE SPECIAL HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS From a technology standpoint, Hitachi Data Systems has these capabilities:

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

IT’S STORAGE VIRTUALISATION FOR NETAPP Enterprises 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.

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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

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

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.” editor@digitchannelconnect.com

solid state drives

I

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

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 DCC TEAM

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

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solid state drives 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 S y s t e m s M a n a g e r, I n d i a n O i l 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

Dell: Storage consolidation all the way Dell feels that storage optimisation will be a major trend in enterprise storage environments this year. “What we are looking at is to create costeffective 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 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 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.

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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 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.

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 this process is more complex, and takes longer. For enterprise-class stor-

FEBRUARY 2010

STORAGE SPECIAL 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.

Innovative Flash SSD is best for business notebook computer storage, while cached flash RAID SSD’s killer applications are data warehousing, video on demand, seismic processing and rendering.

age, 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.

Teamed up with HDD Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the 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 for solid state storage. Flash SSD is best for business notebook computer storage, while cached flash RAID SSD’s killer applications are data warehousing, video on demand, seismic processing and rendering. DDR RAM SSD is great for write-intensive online transaction processing, web transaction 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.”

cover story

DRIVE A HARD BARGAIN

Storage business may be heavily skewed towards HDD,but Teh Ban Seng, VP & MD, APJ Seagate believes that the initial hiccups have been cleared for SSD. DCC Team

DCC: What impact will Solid State Drives (SSD) have on the enterprise storage market? Do you think there is a possibility of SSDs replacing the traditional drives?

There is definitely value and space for SSDs in the enterprise market.

The superior performance of the SSDs is most visible, and the faster read rate that it offers in comparison to the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is another great differentiator that goes in favour of SSDs. SSDs also consume lesser power compared to the traditional drives. However, HDDs will continue to hold the bulk of the storage market in the near future, as there are still a few more issues to be resolved before SSDs go mainstream.

DCC: What are these issues?

Flash memory will not really replace traditional memory in the next

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solid state drives three to five years. The main reason for this is the cost of the SSD technology.

Moreover, hard drives based on DRAM technology cost much less. Another major reason is the high investment required by enterprises. We are talking about petabytes of data. We also need to keep in mind that storage requirements are application-specific.

Also, SSD applies to Tier-Zero, and it is effective for those apps. So, it’s almost impossible for the flash industry to replace the hard disk drives at this point of time. I personally feel that SSDs, rather than competing, will complement HDDs. DCC: Isn’t it high time the flash industry considered a downward revision in prices?

Cost is bound to come down. There is no question about that. There have been several instances of price erosion in the industry. Historically, the flash memory business has been a volatile one. While price fluctuation has been a norm in the short-term, the overall trend in pricing trend has been southbound. The question is how quickly the price will erode. Whether the prices will erode by 30 or 40 percent in the next 1-2 years is anybody’s guess. Two years ago, the price erosion in flash memory

market was very steep, and there was a lot of hype around SSD taking over the traditional drive market. However, in the last six months, the prices have bucked the trend.

DCC: There is significant uptake of SSD in the mobile devices industry because of lower levels of heat, lesser power consumption and steady performance. Doesn’t putting SSD in laptops make a lot of sense?

I would disagree with that. There has not been any significant adoption of SSD technology in the notebook space.

In fact, the trend is downward compared to what it was two years ago. Price points are not falling in line with industry expectations. Also, performance has been below par. There have been a lot of issues on the quality front. When people pay a higher price, they expect a better quality product. When you add all these factors together, it deters the adoption of the SSD in the industry.

It is often perceived that data recovery is difficult from flash-based SSD devices. Is this a deterrent which is preventing the adoption of SSDs in mobile and enterprise applications?

Frankly, we have not faced any such objection from our customers. SSDs are largely criticised for their high cost.

STORAGE SPECIAL “It’s almost impossible for the flash industry to replace the hard disk drives at this point of time.

I personally feel that SSDs, rather than competing, will complement HDDs.”

Earlier there were significant quality issues, but that again has significantly come down.

DCC: What are the initiatives in place to increase the capacity of the SSD drive?

This is a question more appropriate for the manufacturers of flash memory.

They are the ones who own the technology. These semiconductor players are working hard to increase the capacity.

Their aim is to increase capacity and lower the cost at the same time. Their plan was to increase the capacity by 30 percent every year, thereby making SSDs more competitive.

DCC: The Seagate Pulsar SSD is out...

Pulsar is the first in the range of products that we plan to launch in the flash-based SSD space. We have 30 years of experience with the enterprise customers and our advantage lies in our understanding of the customer.

There are over 90 SSD manufacturers worldwide today, but most of them are consumer-based companies that have very little or no experience in the enterprise space. In our case, we have collaborated with the enterprise customers to understand what they want and designed our next generation SSD products.

MARCH 2010, NEW DELHI

Advancing The Enterprise Of Education India Higher Education Conclave will bring together senior leaders from a variety of private higher education institutions to consider new approaches to fostering and harnessing innovation, creativity and technology to drive the growth of their institutions. It will also help them develop an agenda for their institutions to capitalise on these emerging opportunities. The agenda of the conclave will be led by key stakeholders and will involve expert analysis, in-depth panel discussions, focused breakout sessions and insightful keynotes.

http://www.edu-leaders.com/edu2010/

cloud storage

CLOUD STORAGE: Yet to TAKE OFF The service is still evolving and is yet to make it to the priority list of most enterprises Suma P

B

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

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cloud storage 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 services 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

STORAGE SPECIAL 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

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

NEERAJ PAL SINGH SENIOR VP AND CIO, ADITYA BIRLA GROUP

DYNAMIC TIERED STORAGE IS HDS’ MANTRA According 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.

“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. Cloud-based 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.

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.

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Lack of a realistic business model is hampering adoption of cloud computing.

Bandwidth usage and security are the other issues.”

VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL VICE PRESIDENT & GM, HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS

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 noncritical 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. editor@digitchannelconnect.com

green storage

MAKE STORAGE

GREEN

Bring in energy efficient components Drives, controllers, arrays…all 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.

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.

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.

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

Dedupe

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

I

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 a very good idea of how

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to bring in efficiencies. Should you consolidate, virtualize, replace some hard drives with solid state drives, look for drives with power saving features… you will come up with your list.

Consolidate Do you really need multiple small capacity HDDs for 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 ones—this will increase capacity, but keep power needs same.

Virtualise Storage virtualisation can provision storage to fewer physical drives and thus improve the levels of utilisation.

Removing duplicates of data releases storage capacity. And also save 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. That’s tiering of storage.

Dispose in a green way You might be looking at retiring old storage devices. Being able to dispose them off in an eco-friendly manner is also a matter that falls under green storage initiatives. Check 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 to dive deeply into data and understand how it is being stored and read, and then arrive at a storage strategy. editor@digitchannelconnect.com

data deduplication age capacity requirements. Through server virtualisation, enterprises can reduce the amount of servers in their environments and through deduplication they can reduce the amount of storage.

Though data deduplication is an important technology that is quickly being embraced by users as they struggle with issues of data proliferation, enterprises must ensure that they make the right choice while selecting providers.

Making the right pick

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 ASHWANI MISHRA

S

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 require-

ments and improve performance.

Similar to Jain, many enterprises acknowledge the fact that as the amount of primary data within 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 With deduplication, only “unique” data is written during the backup process, which means that significantly less disk capacity is needed on the back-end to store changes. This offers a number of important business benefits such as reduced capex and opex costs.

Most importantly, organisations can reduce backup windows and improve restoration times by using disk versus tape. Recovery time objectives (RTOs) will improve because data can be recovered from disk. With more capacity available, IT may choose to increase the frequency of backups conducted during the day, improving recovery point objectives (RPOs).

“Data deduplication also facilitates server virtualisation deployments as it eliminates much of the disadvantages of server virtualisation projects,” says Surajit Sen, Director–Channels, Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India.

Virtual machine disk images contain highly redundant data and increase stor-

It is expected that the amount of storage will be reduced with deduplication.

However, the results will vary depending on the technology one chooses and the type of data that is being duplicated.

Marketing brochures that claim large deduplication ratios are simply an indication of what is possible in the best case scenario and may not be achievable in each and every environment.

“It is important for enterprises to quantify. Many storage providers offer estimation tools or tests that provide a more realistic expectation of what can be delivered,” says Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Management and Data Protection, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems.

There are a few problems that CIOs can encounter when they look at various deduplication solutions. One of the most critical among them appears in the scenario when data deduplication is applied utilising proprietary formats.

Here data is written directly into the file headers. These headers describe the manner in which data has been deduped and provide pointers to applications.

These applications are assured that they will get the right access to the copy of the data required. According to industry analysts the system of pointers that results from these solutions can lead to some performance degradation.

“Our choice of the provider will only be finalised only after considering all aspects of design, including space savings, efficiency, performance overhead, and resiliency,” says Vijay Kumar, Chief Manager - Information Technology of Bangalore-based The Himalaya Drug Company which is also looking at a data deduplication solution for their storage environment.

Data deduplication will become a critical enabling technology. Besides, it can be successfully paired with other emerging storage technologies including thin provisioning and virtualisation. editor@digitchannelconnect.com

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tape storage Requirements continue to drive the

TAPE MARKET

The diehard legacy of tape in organizational data storage and archival requirements is not over yet, and is likely to hold its ground against competition, at least for another couple of years Soma Tah

A

s the debate about disk and tape continues, a clear delineation of the two markets has emerged, especially in terms of storage and archival requirements, which vary largely from one organization to another. Despite being declared as a dying technology long ago, tape continues to be a preferred data storage option for the medium to long term. Even though an increasing number of organizations have been switching to disks and collaborative technologies such as virtual tape libraries to get speedy access to data, the tape market happily coexists with competing technologies.

Opportunities Disks have not been able to replace tapes yet, as the latter are widely adopted across organizations, mainly due to the advantages of portability, reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness. However, with the declining cost of disk arrays over the past couple of years, disks

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have certainly replaced tape media as the primary storage target for performance, quicker access, software options, RAID protection, and the ability to have multiple concurrent data read or write streams.

In APAC Branded Tape Automation forecasts for 2009–2013 by IDC, Mark Lee, market analyst, IDC Asia Pacific, Storage Research expects a marginal rebound in early 2010 from the delayed purchases in 2009. “The tape automation market would not likely go back to the same revenue trends from previous years, as constant price competition and shift of mindshare toward disk storage become more prominent in the coming years, fueled by constant consolidation trends emerging from the need to streamline IT operations,� he says. But consolidation in storage infrastructure and stricter regulatory requirements will keep the tape market afloat.

To tap the market well, partners need to identify the opportunities and the

STORAGE SPECIAL customer requirements. Tape storage can meet the requirements of both traditional backup and archiving to near-line storage.

For smaller enterprises with minimal storage needs, disk systems are the preferred medium on the first layer of backup and for data which is not critical; but at the second layer of storage and backup, it is always advisable to go for tape.

“For businesses with comparatively small volumes of data which is not so business-critical, it is always a good choice to go for disk,” says Sameer Vitkar, Head, Sales and Marketing, Accelera Systems. “For example, 1TB disk would cost one around 7,000- 10,000. For storing nearly the same amount of data (800 GB), one has to shell out lakhs of rupees, including the drive and media costs,” he adds.

However, as awareness about data backup compliance increases, the tape adoption rate among Indian enterprises and SMBs is growing gradually.

Disk-based backup devices are still an expensive option for backup and archival. Sandeep Dutta, VP, Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/SA points out, “Tape technology is promising increased capacity for years to come, which has important implications, as tape storage systems are more energyefficient and cost-effective than hard disk drive storage systems. Businesses and governments use magnetic tape to store, protect and access large volumes of important data, including data and video archives, back-up files, replicas for disaster recovery, and retention of information required for regulatory compliance. As the planet becomes more intelligent, integrated and interconnected, there will be an explosive growth in the rate at which data is created. The majority of this data, such as transportation traffic patterns, the food supply chain, image rich media, and health and financial industries, which will be stored on tape. For many storage administrators, tape is no longer the first media that comes to mind when designing a new backup solution.”

“Tape-based solutions are complementary to the disk based and data backup software solution. It provides partners with opportunity to make extra revenue and add value to their solution and business. Without a tapebased solution, the data backup and archival solution is not complete. If the partner is missing out on the tape portion in its solution, he is giving an

opportunity to the competition to enter into his account/customer. In case of any disaster, it is only tape which can assure data recovery for its customer.

The bottom-line is: sell storage solutions, not storage; that’s where the value is.” says Niraj Mandal, Regional Sales Manager, SAARC & Middle East Countries, Tandberg Data (Asia) Pte Ltd.

Markets continue to evolve Barring the lower-end tape drive market, whe re AIT (Advanc e d Intelligent Tape) still holds its ground, the tape market has been increasingly dominated by the LTO (Linear TapeOpen) format. Since it was first released at the beginning of the decade, the LTO tape specification has come to dominate the market for midrange tape drives. In the midrange market, LTO rules with almost 80 per cent market share. The next generation of the LTO format, LTO-5 is round the corner; while LTO-6 is already in the roadmap.

LTO-5, which is likely to hit the market in April this year, promises 1.6 TB data storage capacity, with an uncompressed data transfer rate of 180 MB/s. In comparison, LTO-4 has 800 GB capacity, with a data transfer rate of 80-120 MB/s. Higher capacity certainly gives organizations a chance to keep the same physical footprint, while keeping up with the doubling of data that happens every two years, on average. But this will certainly come with a higher price tag and might make customers reconsider their upgrade decisions. “ T h e n e w L i n e a r Tap e O p e n Generation 5 tape drive specification is progressing well, and is on its way to being solidified. LTO-5 tape technology offers a cost-efficient way for Indian enterprises to store data. The products are useful for long-term archival, as well as regular backup of active data. So, I feel India is ready for LTO-5,” says Dutta of IBM India/SA. “LTO has a very promising roadmap.

DAT Drive and RDX Quickstor also have very good future roadmap. With growing data size and data consolidation across industries, LTO-5 is to find its position in the market. But, there can be some changes – such as the number of slots required in tape library may reduce, as the storage capacity per data cartridge has doubled from LTO-4 to LTO-5,” explains Mandal of Tandberg Data (Asia).

A completely different perspective comes from Avishek Haldar, Business Development Manager-India, Imation

Tape technology promises increased capacity, which has important implications, as tape storage systems are more energy efficient and cost-effective than hard disk drive storage systems.”

SANDEEP DUTTA VP, STORAGE, SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY GROUP, IBM INDIA/SA

Disk is your first line of information access, but tape is your last line of information defense. The bottomline is — sell storage solutions, not storage; that’s where the value is.”

NIRAJ MANDAL, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, SAARC & MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES, TANDBERG DATA (ASIA) PTE LTD

cover story India Pvt. Ltd. “The drive library manufacturers haven’t worked enough to populate the market with LTO-4; and the market is not even ready to embrace LTO-5. On the contrary, LTO-5 might bring stability back to LTO-4 media prices, which have seen a drop of more than 70 per cent over the last three years. Format wise, I see a lot of traction for 3592 formats, as IBM, for the last two quarters, is focusing a lot to peddle the 3592 format in the BFSI sector. And slowly, it will be a success, for its robust nature and backup capacity up to 1.4 TB,” he says.

Challenges Massive growth in data volumes and the need to consolidate backup by reducing backup windows and data recovery times are slowly replacing traditional tape-based backup from the first layer of the process. Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) integrate seamlessly into existing tape backup environments, without the need to change existing backup software and processes. VTL reduces cost and administration by enabling backup consolidation, and brings the performance benefits of disk-based backup. In the long term, the tape automation market will be migrated to disk-based solutions and virtual tape libraries (VTLs) to a great extent. But, on the other hand, “growing awareness on archiving solutions will make tape a preferred medium for offsite storage management,” says Yati Mago, Asssistant Manager Pre-Sales, CCS Computers.

“Solid State Drive (SSD) is slowly becoming commercially viable and with the latest developments, we can see a roadmap for tape drive and SSD, which will deliver excellent data backup, restoration and archival to users. With no moving parts, SSDs are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent,” says Mandal.

“The biggest challenge, I would say, is fewer tape OEMs, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Sun, Fujitsu, Tandberg; against a slew of NAS/SAN solution providers, such as HP, IBM, Sun, Dell, NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, EMC, or Apple,” says Haldar.

“However, despite disadvantages such as fungus attacks and risk of data corruption, tape has its own set of advantages, such as low cost per gigabyte, better ROI over the years, energy saving, offsite data management, and usefulness for data retention for longer time frame,” says Manoj Madhavan, Cubic Computing. editor@digitchannelconnect.com

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STORAGE SPECIAL

analyst speak

TIERED STORAGE GAINING GROUND Aman Munglani – Principal Research Analyst, Gartner India

2010 will be a fairly strong year for the external storage market DCC: What are your key findings about the storage market in India?

Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage revenue totaled $3.9 billion in the Q3 of 2009, a 7.3 percent decline from 2008.

The Indian ECB market dropped 20 percent YoY basis and totaled $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 the last quarter.

Companies are facing challenges such as low utilisation of available storage, junk machines due to duplicate

data. Storage virtualisation, de-duplication along with VTL (virtual tape library), thin provisioning and tiered storage technology will gain ground.

Storage virtualisation has gained a lot of traction 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.

It is a myth that real growth in storage will come from SMB, large companies are also looking at it.”

DCC: Do you think cloud storage will gain prominence?

I am afraid cloud-based services are still evolving. The concept of cloudbased storage is still raw but if you

have storage 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 ser vice 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.

DCC: 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% growth in the overall external storage revenues.

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.

STORAGE ALLOCATION IS AN ISSUE Aniket Dongre – Lead Analyst, Enterprise Storage and Solutions Practice at IDC India

Dongre shares the key storage trends in India DCC: How is the disk storage market performing in India?

In Q3 (July-September) 2009, IDC estimates revenue for India disk storage systems market to be $ 62 million, a decline of 11.4% YoY. 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. DCC: 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

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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.

DCC: Are companies 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 stron-

FEBRUARY 2010

Most of the data created in enterprises today is duplicated.

Thus retrieving it is a major concern for IT managers.”

ger uptake in large enterprises and select mid-sized companies.

DCC: Will the adoption of cloud storage be driven by service providers?

Increasingly ‘storage-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud storage’ will be driven by Telecom 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.

STORAGE SPECIAL

Future of the

STORAGE INDUSTRY Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to be a concern for most enterprises.

P K GUPTA

P K Gupta

I

was asked a question: how is the storage industry doing? In one word – 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, 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.

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 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

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

As organisations keep multiple copies of the data for long periods of time, removing redundancy at the sub-block level within the files and across servers and organisation will make for a killer app.

guest expression 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 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

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guest expression efficiently now and in future. These are T11, iSCSI, FCIP, FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) r u n n i n g o n C E E ( C o nve r ge d 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 silicon-based chip technologies that use nanostructured

STORAGE SPECIAL

The business benefits of FCoE include reduced cost and complexity, better and flexible performance.

New Considerations for

STORAGE

Adopting the right technology to implement tiered storage is important to get maximum benefits.

Hobert Yoshida

S

torage 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 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.

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First, I would say that all data is valuable or you shouldn’t be keeping it.

Secondly I would separate out 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

FEBRUARY 2010

HUBERT YOSHIDA

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.

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!

P K Gupta is Chairman, SNIA South Asia

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.

Yoshida is VP & CTO, Hitachi Data Systems