Corporate Dossier 2013: Unified Storage, The New Mantra

Storage is today one of the most important aspects of an organization's IT priorities. This is especially true for organizations which deal with large data, irrespective of the size of the company. Reaching a state of maximum storage efficiency has become a business priority for organizations due to the business advantage associated with it. Consequently, this is impacting the networking storage market in India. Besides, Indian enterprises have begun to realize that smart networking storage systems is a practical solution to big storage problems such as the proliferation of low-cost servers, application data growth and the need to deliver better application performance.

Rajesh Awasthi, director, telecom and cloud service provider, NetApp India, said, "From the technology perspective, the networking storage market in India is growing. The market figures by IDC suggest that by Q3 of FY12, the size of Indian open network storage market was approximately $151 mn. As far as the trends are concerned, customers are looking at shared IT infrastructure and storage happens to be the key criteria. But at the same time, customers are a little cautious in their spend, as they don't want to overspend and make IT inhibit their growth."

Factors Fueling the growth

The networking storage market is primarily driven by digital data explosion and the resulting need for efficient data storage infrastructure amongst enterprises. Increased activity amongst key verticals such as BFSI, manufacturing, telecom, government, IT/ITeS, and media and entertainment is also boosting this market by a large extent.

Rekuram Vardharaj, marketing director, enterprise solutions & growth markets, Dell India, said, "Another reason for the increasing prominence of networking storage is the growth of data itself. Big Data has caused storage needs to quadruple. Storage efficiency is thus becoming more and more important and there is now more focus on storage efficient technologies such as server virtualization and cloud. This focus is consequently changing networking storage."

"The pressures of big data and the need for lifelong data retention place high demands on storage hardware capabilities and capacities. Five years ago the capital cost of hardware (CAPEX) was approximately less than 20% of the total cost of ownership (TCO). Today, the hardware cost is estimated to be as much as 50% of the TCO due to increasing demand for storage capacity and a slowdown in price erosion as advances in storage technologies begin to flatten. While IT continues to focus on operational costs as they did in 2012, they are also focusing on reducing capital costs by reducing the amount of unnecessary data storage," added Yogesh Sawant, director, partner sales and Field Alliance Organization, India, Hitachi Data Systems.

 

 

Current Trends

Networking Storage is gaining a lot of importance in today's enterprise IT adoption. CIOs are beginning to realize the importance of improving their network storage which will enable them improve their IT infrastructures and capabilities. The new networking storage is moving towards a point where decisions regarding storage systems start with Network storage. This is because choosing the right storage networking systems can ensure linking of previously disparate networks which will result in simpler administration, less complexity and lower costs.

"IT organizations will attempt to take back control of their own assets (and budgets) and the deployment of private cloud architectures will accelerate during the second half of the year. IT organizations will also challenge the new breed of service provider by offering competing hosted services. This strategy will help them to bolster revenue opportunities from a market that will be worth $73 bn by 2015," said KP Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director, Brocade Communications.

Another trend that is gaining prominence is Software Defined Networking (SDN). This approach to networking makes use of a software application rather than hardware to control its systems. SDN would simplify Network Access Control functions by completely automating them and this will lead to greater efficiency. Consequently, this will lead to a greater demand for network software engineers.

Additionally, the rise of BYOD and cloud computing in the workplace is increasing the focus on extending networking storage to personal devices.

Technological advancements

Until a few years back, the network storage industry was divided on NAS and SAN lines but now, the industry is moving towards one unified storage platform. Today, there is a clear movement towards unified storage, wherein instead of a separate NAS or SAN appliance, a converged unified storage box is being seen as a better value proposition.

While most data centre storage systems being shipped today still use traditional block-based technology, there has been tremendous growth in unstructured content such as digital media, which is often stored in file-based systems. Even as the balance is shifting to file-based storage a typical enterprise will have to manage both types of storage for a long time. Unified storage combines file-based and block-based storage in one system and demand is increasing at a rapid rate.

And as the enterprises are struggling with a deluge of data and increasingly diverse data management needs, today storage vendors are offering unified storage devices and solution that makes for both NAS and SAN. With the arrival of this new concept of unified storage, the enterprise customers are exploring solutions that can transform their storage architectures more agile, flexible, and scalable. Also, it gives more freedom and choice for the IT decision makers to create a more robust as well as efficient storage backbone.

Unified storage was initially championed largely by one major industry player i.e. NetApp but now other biggies like EMC, Dell, IBM, and HP has jumped into the bandwagon. This high rate of adoption is testament that unified storage has proven broadly attractive and delivered major value to customers.

Akhil Kamat, business manager, storage, Systems, and Technology Group, IBM ISA, highlighted, "From the late 2010 onwards, we started witnessing this trend of unified storage architecture. We realized that customers were looking for solutions which could consolidate their storage requirements. We have consciously put an effort to build it in our product portfolios and address each and every segment of the market."

Adding further, Deepak Varma, regional head, presales, EMC India and Saarc, stated, "Unified storage plays a very significant and critical role in the developing economies like India where people want to start small in a modular manner and keep on scaling up the same thing by adding more data, application, and information in a unified manner. The biggest advantage is that you have one container to manage all the information efficiency."

Vendors' Power-play

Dell being an overall Converged infrastructure vendor is seeing a very different view of its networking equipment market. On the data center front the opportunities coming up are move server, storage converged with networking as the solution glue. What this means for networking vendors is conformity towards single pane management for these converged platforms, integration points on the server and storage side of solution as well as workload awareness at networking component level.

"Dell's networked storage solutions provide a highly efficient and flexible virtualized storage platform for enterprises and the cloud. Campuses continue the use of application convergence drive and we see more of surveillance, building automation, voice / video converged play rather than network constructs purely for data services. In our capacity, we envisage the opportunity pockets more blended towards converged infrastructure play and/or converged application play rather than pure networking equipment supply opportunities. This is a big shift and networking equipment change-of-course trend in our view," added Vardharaj.

Brocade has been a leader in terms of enabling the new convergence application in the data center. The architecture that Brocade designs with flexibility and a lot of creativity designed for customers from a networking stand point which is really built on the ability to enable all forms of convergence for the customer.

Unnikrishnan asserted, "Though Brocade solutions provide customers investment protection; they don't need to discard their existing infrastructures. Brocade is designed for virtualization and is very simple to operate - today CIOs spend 70% of their budgets for managing their data centers and networks and spend only 30% towards acquiring new infrastructure, Brocade solutions help reverse that and focus on building networks for the future."

Meanwhile, in the Indian market, Hitachi Data Systems continues to see strong demand for its products. Customers have been evaluating their costs to return on investment (RoI) and noticed that 75 - 80% of their storage infrastructure is wasted. "We are helping customers reclaim about 66% of this wasted capacity via software and services," said Sawant.

NetApp has introduced a range of innovative solutions in the area of unified storage. Its SANscreen software provides a unified view across and an end-to-end storage environment. SANscreen automatically correlates the storage infrastructure into a set of storage devices, detects and analyzes the impact of change, gathers real-time and historical performance data from virtual machine to storage devices, allows customized reporting that drives all storage operation decisions, and much more.

Highlighting IBM's product offerings in the unified storage space, Kamat, pointed out, "We have this SONAS solution that specifically caters to the NAS scenario in the high-end market. For the mid-range market, last year, we launched V7000 unified which as all the best features from the SONAS portfolio. We also have N series in the product offering for the entry level customers who are looking at unified storage. While we are seeing movement around Big Data, newer applications like CCTV and Video-on-Demand, our unified storage products are ready for this market."

Similarly, EMC made aggressive forays into the unified storage space a couple of years back by announcing the VNX family designed for virtual data centers and offered a converged solution. The VNX family includes the VNXe entry series with added simplicity for small and medium businesses and the VNX series that delivers high performance, efficiency, and simplicity for demanding virtual application environments.

"With its VNX product line, EMC has come up with a very compelling technology that has been easily adopted in the Indian market. Since Indian market is very price sensitive and the customers look for TCO, our VNX products are at the top of customers' mind recall," explained Varma.