DATA Storage : Data's Day Out With Storage

Customers are looking for new ways to simplify their operations, optimize
performance, increase efficiencies, mitigate risks, reduce power consumption,
decrease TCO and space, and move into the future with easy-to-manage storage
systems that deliver better economics and return-on-investment (RoI).

While Gartner sees big adoption of data de-duplication, thin provisioning,
and networked and parallel storage, Vinod Menon of Ashtech Technologies sees the
emergence of storage virtualization, de-duplication, and SAN and NAS with
unified storage approach as powerful and practical ways to get more from
existing storage systems.

“IP-based storage is gaining momentum in India because it helps in total
network storage consolidation of storage resources at a lower cost, centralizes
the storage architecture, manage cost, capacity and scalability, especially in
SMBs,” said AL Jagannath, GM-Marketing, Sun Microsystems India.

While Surajit Sen, Director-Marketing and Alliances India, NetApp sees scale
out storage, thin provisioning/thin cloning/thin replication, Ethernet-based
storage, cloud computing and flash storage as the latest technology innovations,
Prakash Krishnamurthy, Country Manager-StorageWorks India, HP said that
consolidation, encryption and IP-SAN (said to be a fastest growing technology
opportunities for SPs) technologies have a way to go.

Apart from this, the storage tiering based on workload requirements approach
is gaining acceleration. Need to have external storage, both from scalability
and capacity perspective is giving boost to FC/ IP SAN and NAS.

Products for businesses

HP's offerings include pairing of storage multi-protocol, gateways for NAS and
disc assistance backup. For these, HP has Enterprise Virtual Array models.
LeftHand Networks products operate in the IP network and MSA 2000 offers simple
framework for data consolidation. Girish Madhavan of Quadsel Systems informed
that his company is deploying HP's LeftHand Networks, based on iSCSI technology.
It is also working with VMware, Citrix and Riverbed, and offers solutions like
SAN, D2D (disc-to-disc) or de-duplication, D2D2T (disc-to-disc-to-tape).

Seagate announced the availability of Savvio 15K.2 HDD (a part of Seagate's
Unified Storage Architecture). Besides these, the storage vendor insists in
keeping both SSD and HDD solutions in its portfolio, shared Rajesh Khurana,
Country Manager-India and SAARC, Seagate Technology.

CA's new 12.5 release of Arcserve is built using data de-duplication and SRM.
“Features like 'assured recovery' and automated disaster recovery testing are
provided as part of CA XOSoft base product at no additional cost,” informed
Vijayant Rai, Director Channels-India and SAARC, CA.

Saving Measures

A study done by Gartner says that it costs three to five times the amount
per GB to manage storage than to purchase storage. It has been found that
companies store duplicate copies of the same piece of data. This means that they
need more libraries, more discs and eventually a larger data center, all of
which increases cost. However, greater volume of data doesn't just lead to an
increase in investments. It could also affect the speed and effectiveness of
backups and the time required to find a piece of data from archives. According
to various industry analysts, overall downtime costs average 3.6 percent of
annual revenue.

To combat these issues, Jagannath recommended the deployment of information
lifecycle management (ILM), integrated with identity management for balancing
the cost of storing and managing information.

Some times back, Sun announced the availability of Sun Storage 7000 family,
also known as 'Amber Road', which offers up to 75 percent cost savings. Sun also
has computing platforms, such as Open Solaris and Linux. ZFS is included in the
Solaris operating system for no additional licensing fee.

The best way to control the storage management cost, according to Vikas
Kumar, Storage Lead, CSC India is by using storage resource management (SRM)
toolsets. “Modern toolsets are based on standards like SNIA SMI, which are
simple to use, agent-less and capable to work across heterogeneous storage
environment,” he added, claiming that CSC's Storage Service Catalog has several
standard storage solutions, which may be mixed and matched as per requirement.

In a customer survey, CommVault found that on an average, its customers can
save up to 80 percent of their ongoing storage outlay on media through its built
storage software suite organically on a single code base and common platform,”
claimed Vivek Anand, Regional Director-India and SAARC, CommVault. Some of its
other storage offerings include Microsoft Active Directory and CommVault Simpana.

FCoE-based Brocade 8000 switch and 1010/1020 converged network adapters bring
together the fiber channel (FC) standard and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE)
together. Also on the offer is 8Gbps end-to-end SAN infrastructure from Brocade
for medium and enterprise-class organizations and Data Center Fabric (DCF).

Just for you, dear partners

Last year, Sun enhanced its Partner Advantage Program, which gives its
partners access to Sun's technology and online support, interact and learn from
its worldwide developer community. The company has also developed interactive
forums, blogs and wikis for each technology area.

HP has partner programs called 'Thank God Its SAN-Day' and 'Power Breakfast',
where they are trained on EVA products, and Left Hand Network and MSA products,
respectively. The vendor also comes out with monthly newsletters on product
launches and business development.

Seagate has opened SeaCare Centers in collaboration with its Seagate Partner
Program members. This program comprises an interactive web portal. The company
has also introduced services like Seagate Regional Customer Councils, toll-free
call support, walk-in warranty exchange centers, SMS-based service support,
mobile service vans and free pick-and-drop warranty service.

NetApp has a sales accreditation training program called NetApp Accredited
Sales Professional Workshop and a pre-sales accreditation program called NetApp
Accredited Storage Architect Program.

Appreciating the policies built on storage, Vishwanath Ramaswamy,
Director-Partner and Alliances, EMC India and SAARC, he said that SMB's patterns
can help SPs to provide cost-effective boxes to make their business architecture
work.

Increased number of new connectivity devices and mobility of users have
driven an unprecedented need to source and access information from anywhere at
anytime. Combined with explosive data growth, this development creates a
daunting challenge for enterprises.

“This situation will require rearrangement of network infrastructure and will
need robust extraordinary networks to support conver­gence. Servers are
simultaneously converging onto Fiber Channel over Ethernet and Converged
Enhanced Ethernet,” shared Ashis Guha, Country Manager-India, Brocade
Communications Systems.

RACHNA GUPTA

rachnagu@cybermedia.co.in