STORAGE MANAGEMENT: Riding High On Data Explosion

Explosive data growth in enterprises has necessitated movement to
network-centric storage models to keep data safe with the real task being to
manage storage. The reasons for this data explosion are numerous, such as the
growth of the Internet, workplace automation, use of enterprise applications,
and the need to archive historical data.

Just to put this growth in perspective, the Indian storage market was worth
$100 million in revenue terms for the first three quarters of 2003. IDC believes
that the Indian storage market will grow at a CAGR of 65% up to 2007 with
telecom, BFSI, manufacturing and BPO expected to be the biggest spenders on
storage along with the SME segment.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

When we talk about storage management, the question arises ­ how will an
enterprise optimally harness the data to make sure it is available all the time?
To do this, it's essential to follow appropriate storage management practices.
Over the last few years' storage management has evolved from a server-centric
model to a network-centric model. And this shift has naturally given rise to new
difficulties, concepts, and challenges.

Challenges like storage interoperability issues keep cropping up because not
all vendors' products interoperate even though they claim to do so. The
products are sometimes proprietary in nature. Enterprises may have legacy
systems and multiple OSs, which are difficult to integrate. And new storage
standards like iSCSI, Infiniband, and Bluefin are already in various stages of
maturity even though earlier standards like Fiber Channel have not been adopted
very widely.

Creating and deploying a well-structured storage management infrastructure is
the best way to overcome the challenges. The storage software management modules
should be able to capture information efficiently and allow monitoring of best
practices and usage patterns. It should be able to load balance, simplify
administration, automate the entire storage architecture and ensure consistency.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

SATA (Serial ATA) is a technology, which will soon gain popularity in the
market. SATA will help in driving down costs as it supplements fibre channel
disks in storage boxes and will create a market for inexpensive network storage
solutions.

Managing Storage The Right Way

Dealing with data protection and taking care of backup and restoration as well as media management. Proper handling of storage resource management. One should look at the storage performance optimization, allocation of assignments, control measures, capacity analysis, and storage service level metering and charge back.

Ultra Density Optical (UDO) is the next generation of Magneto Optical (MO)
and offers three times the capacity, higher performance and lower cost per
gigabytes over its predecessor MO. HP UDO 30GB write once and rewritable disks
are the new standard for professional optical storage. Based on ultra density,
blue laser technology; it is the recognized successor to 5.25 inch MO storage.
UDO media stores up to three times the data at 84% less than the cost of MO. It
is ideal for medical, graphic, government, financial and pharmaceutical
industries because it meets the key archival attributes for maximum authenticity
and trustworthiness, long retention periods, high capacities and scalability and
low long-term cost of ownership.

With the advent of the HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS),
customers have got a high-performance solution that simplifies long-term data
management, reduces costs and addresses growing regulatory and retention
requirements. Unlike other offerings that require integration of numerous
hardware and software components by the customer or a third-party, RISS is
pre-integrated with partner technologies and includes support and services to
deliver a complete Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution for active
archiving and rapid retrieval of e-mail and other common data types.

Fabric attached storage (FAS) encompasses both SAN and NAS. Both these
technologies are converging into block and file capable fabric attached storage.
FAS will steadily become more popular because of the versatility of its
architecture, which permits many servers and clients to share common storage
assets.

ILM

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has come about in response to the
needs of businesses to manage their information through its lifecycle, i.e. from
creation through to eventual deletion. Using ILM ­ which can be best described
as an approach or a strategy ­ any business is able to manage its data
intelligently with minimum human intervention. Two major factors have aided the
development of ILM as a comprehensive set of data management processes and
policies. Firstly, the phenomenal data growth and secondly, changing
governmental regulations demand that data be retained for longer periods. Simply
put, ILM is a strategy for data management through its lifecycle. The idea is to
manage data from the time it is created till the time it is no longer needed.

THE END OBJECTIVE

Enterprise storage management is likely to surface as the most significant
contributor to any organization's operational savings. The goal of storage
management is to streamline and automate as many daily tasks that consume staff
resources as possible. Administrators will need to examine how and which
operational tasks can be automated and leveraged across server operating systems
and multi-vendor storage hardware. This will help to increase storage capacity
either keep the number of storage infrastructure and storage operations staff
constant, or will hopefully decrease the number of staff over time.

Avijit Basu is Country
Sales Manager, Network Solutions Group, HP India.