LOGGING OUT BAD DATA
Akhtar Pasha, May 25, 2009
The Financial Express
An increasing number of enterprises are focusing on optimising their storage resources using virtualisation and tiered storage. Yahoo, Google and Rediff were early movers to a tiered storage architecture, moving email from higher cost fibre channel (FC) storage to lower cost storage devices for archival. This trend has gained traction with enterprises such as Tata Tele Services, MindTree, Syndicate Bank, Ashok Leyland and Crest Animation Studios tiering their storage differently to reduce their storage costs and handle the rapid increase in their data capacities.
That’s not all. About 60 percent of the public sector banks are already using this model to age their storage resources. A large section of customers are using a tiered storage architecture where fibre channel and serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) disks co-exist in the same storage box. “Tiered storage is getting all the attention and customers are demanding these solutions to reduce TCO,” says Vivekanand Venugopal, vice-president, products and services (Asia Pacific), Hitachi Data Systems.
BSNL and HDFC Bank have virtualised their storage and are using tiered storage for further reducing the storage costs. Venugopal says, “HDFC Bank chose a tiered storage solution and has migrated from direct-attached storage (DAS) to storage area network (SAN) for real time benefits using Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, Hitachi Lightning 9900 V Series enterprise and Hitachi Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage systems. The bank used to have 33 days of downtime in a year and its elimination can be translated into hardware storage savings.” Today, customers have started classifying their storage as per business applications. For instance, Syndicate Bank uses tiered storage for strategic business reasons. Its entire business continuity and disaster recovery operations are modeled on tiered storage.
The Indian external controller based storage market grew 44 percent in revenue terms in 2006; growth tapered off to 20 percent in 2007 for the market to reach $204 million. As per preliminary data from IDC, this market has grown by 46 percent in 2008 to reach $285 million, but it fell short of the original forecast of $312 million because of a dip in the second half of 2008.
When 2008 began, storage virtualisation, data de-duplication and tiered storage were still emerging and solid-state drives (SSDs) were a pipedream for enterprise storage arrays.
It is now hard to find a storage vendor that is not pushing at least one of these technologies, if not all three. A severe liquidity crisis and curtailed IT spending had an adverse effect on the storage market during the second half of the last year. Surajit Sen, director-marketing and alliances, NetApp says, “While most large customers had put their storage related projects on the backburner or deferred purchases, customers are demanding technology solutions that can help them optimise their storage investments.” The pressure for cost reduction has led to the rapid adoption of technologies such as thin provisioning, de-duplication, RAID-DP, and Snapshot, which come as standard on NetApp systems. The company claims that its customers are realising space savings greater than 70 percent with these technologies in their virtual infrastructures.
“We are assuring customers they will use at least 50 percent less storage in their virtual desktop and server environments. This will reduce their overall storage usage while improving performance,” says Sen. He adds, “we recently acquired a BPO customer who has seen a 60 percent space on its storage hardware. Similarly a banking customer in Mumbai has seen a 65-70 percent space saving on its physical storage.” Prakash Krishnamoorthy, country manager, HP StorageWorks Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales says, “We experienced traction for the entry-level networked storage (NAS) in the mid-market segment and entry-level SAN sales were driven by SMBs. We found the media, animation and BPO verticals buying our entry-level SAN solutions such as the AIO 1200 and 600 that come with 9 TB and 12 TB of storage respectively.
FROM MB TO GB TO TB TO…
D. Murali, May 25, 2009
The Hindu Business Line
How much information did we create in 2008? The equivalent of more than: 237 billion fully-loaded Amazon Kindle wireless reading devices, 4.8 quadrillion online bank transactions, 3 quadrillion Twitter feeds, 162 trillion digital photos, 30 billion fully-loaded Apple iPod Touches, 19 billion fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs... Thus informs a recent EMC-sponsored IDC study titled, ‘As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands.’ I’m sure this must be great news for those in the storage business. Such as, Prakash Krishnamoorthy.
He is the Country Manager, Storage Works Division, Hewlett-Packard India Sales P Ltd, Chennai ( www.hp.com/in), and when we meet on April 16, I ask him, “From MB to GB to TB… Where are we headed to?”
In an era of information abundance, data sizes will continue to grow every day, observes Krishnamoorthy. “Today there are more computers, more servers, more applications, and more digitisation — all of which require massive storage capacities. We are already starting to define new capacity estimates for 1000s of TB and 10,000s of TB.”
Our conversation continues over e-mail.
Excerpts from the interview:
What do you see as the key drivers behind the seemingly insatiable appetite for storage?
The growth for storage is pervasive across all industries. Organisations are deploying more computers, more homes are being wired with computers and the Internet, more classrooms are being enabled with computers. We are also digitising every form of information and are increasingly consuming digital content in every walk of life.
On the other hand, today every business decision triggers an IT (information technology) activity, and every IT activity results in the creation of data. Newer forms of information like rich media, digital camera, digital video camera, animation, rendering, spatial data, volumetric data representation in research areas, visualisation on design engineering that are data-rich are also contributing to the ever-increasing growth in storage. Increased collaboration and improved communication in a globalised world are some of the key drivers for the growth of storage.
Can you outline the broad turning points in the evolution of storage?
This is a hard question to answer, as there have been so many innovations that have changed, and continue to change, the market. To begin, the evolution of the external hard disk itself was a turning point. Look at the rate at which disk capacity has improved. A 2.5” drive today supports a capacity which used to be the capacity of a data centre at least a decade ago.
The reliability of the disks is another turning point. There is so much of business-critical data that resides in disks. If the reliability is even a shade poor, it has a significant business impact.
Fibre channel (FC) technology is another turning point, as it opened the external storage technology and led to rapid progress in SAN (storage area network) technologies.
The birth of the audio tapes resulting in creation of the DAT (digital audio tape) technology is another important milestone. Data protection through tape backup is still the first line of defence for every customer. There have also been rapid strides on this front with high-capacity media, faster data write, and faster data ready tapes.
More recently, the emergence of iSCSI (Internet SCSI or small computer system interface) has marked an important turning point as it opens network storage to an era of very high growth.
What fibre channel (FC) did to the external market in large enterprises and early adopters, IP (Internet protocol) SAN or iSCSI will do to the small and medium-size customers.
The field of external thumb drives, the evolution of SD (secure digital) cards, de-duplication, storage replication, RAID (redundant array of independent disks) level protection, are some of the other things that are making significant strides in the industry.
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