Expert View

March 5, 2005
Major opportunities for storage vendors in SME segment: HDS

Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty

NEW DELHI -- Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a leading storage vendor, has a responsibility to develop the market in India by creating an awareness and educations programs about protecting customer data and increasing performance around storage environments. According to Srikant Chakrapani, consulting director, HDS, the SME segment in India is definitely a big market in terms of opportunity and needs a powerful and easily manageable solution at a reasonably good price point. Convergence*plus recently met up with him to learn more about the issues and opportunities in the storage networking industry. Excerpts from an interview:

Convergence*plus: What are the leading pain points in the storage industry?

Srikant Chakrapani: The main pain points of the storage industry are managing data, changing technology, and interoperability and virtualization.

Managing data: Business produces vast volumes of data. There are different categories of data, depending on the value (in terms of critical information), primary or secondary data, old or recent data, and so on. The biggest challenge is to provide one single solution to manage all grades of data.

Changing technology: Migrating data from an obsolete technology to a recent one is another big challenge for any company. For example, data on a tape drive today would need to be changed to the latest digital format.

Interoperability and virtualization: The customer, over a period of time, would have accumulated certain equipment and adopted storage practices for managing storage, be it tape drives, storage disks, software, backup tools, DR policies. As his business requirements scale, the customer should be able to choose the best available product suiting his needs and should be able to run the storage operations without any major changes. The storage solutions should be standards based so that interoperability is a given for customer storage environments.

CP: What are the best practices in the storage industry?

SC: There are basically four parameters based on which a customer should choose a storage solution for his company. These are management, availability, performance and scalability.

Management: While deciding on a storage solution, the management needs to keep into consideration the technological and operational changes. It also needs to figure out how to manage the data, which could come from heterogeneous environments.

Availability: The company should ensure the protection of the data and also see that the storage device and services do not become obsolete in the near future.

Performance: Non-performance is non-availability. Customers understand that buying a product, which just suits today's needs, will not work well with the management as TCO costs increase with more storage footprints.

Scalability: Organizations should consider a solution today, which would not get redundant within at least three years down the line.

CP: What is the opportunity in the storage and service market?

SC: Enterprise customers have the skills and the wherewithal to evaluate and implement a solution that fits into their business needs. It is actually the SME segment that needs a powerful and easily manageable solution at a reasonably good price point. This segment in India is a big market in terms of opportunity.

SMEs need a turnkey solution where storage integrators can package storage devices, backup components and software to run the business system seamlessly. SME customers would like to have a solution by which their data is protected against disasters - where service providers can take customers' data and keep it in a protected place, just like our money in the bank, and be able to provide it back to the customer on a need basis and with clearly defined service levels of protections and restorals.

CP: How can market potential be converted to market reality in the SME segment?

SC: Firstly, the complexity of the system should be removed. Easy to implement, easy to manage and easy to scale technology appeals the most to the SME segment. The choice of storage partners who could do the turnkey solutions for the customer and not restrict themselves to point solutions is also a key consideration.

CP: Are customers ready for distributed storage environments?

SC: The reason customers chose consolidation is that it is easier and more cost-effective to manage data in one single data center. In a centralized storage system, management is easier. All resources are put together to manage one single information storage solution. When a company can derive specific benefits of distributing storage like access or disaster recovery, and business continuity, and are able to devote other resources in terms of money and technical resources, this can be considered. The challenge is also to consolidate management information across all the distributed storage centers.

CP: Is there a need for on-demand storage in an on-demand world?

SC: This concept will be more prevalent among the big users of data storage like large telcos, government agencies, etc. Some customers are considering this in the country.

CP: Is convergence ahead in the storage industry and to what extent?

SC: HDS has led the market in the area of convergence by introducing controller-based virtualization capabilities in our enterprise storage offerings. What it means is that the customer can use cheaper disk arrays and still avail of the benefits of enterprise storage software management solution of the enterprise environments. Scalability, management and functionality are the major virtues of this solution.

CP: Does one size fit all? In which direction is the storage infrastructure headed?

SC: Of course not! Customers should chose solutions that fit in their organizational business needs of data availability, performance, scalability, management and TCO over a defined period like three years. The storage industry is no longer capacity driven - other parameters like performance and management play a much bigger role.

CP: How can SATA really improve TCO?

SC: The cost of managing a terabyte of storage on SATA is much cheaper than the cost of a terabyte on a fiber channel disk. If you can scale better on SATA, the management cost comes down drastically. The areas to consider are performance and slightly reduced reliability as compared to fiber channel drives. However, leading storage technology vendors like HDS have improved reliability by implementing firmware changes on the storage controllers, which include pro-active monitoring of disk drives and added enhancements to controllers to prolong disk life.

CP: How do you see the future for IP-SAN, as against SAN, NAS and fiber channel?

SC: SAN and NAS are used to address slightly different data management needs. NAS is used where file sharing and sequential access is predominant, for example, in the software industry). SAN is used where performance, random data access environments like databases and guaranteed data availability are the key requirements. What HDS offers is a unique proposition - get the best of the NAS and SAN, and attach to the powerful storage controllers and you need not worry about islands of storage. The data - be it file sharing or OLTP data - sits on the same storage array and is serviced through the SAN switch or the NAS header for the concerned application as the case may be.

Within SAN there are two types of connectivity - fiber channel and IP-SAN. In the present scenario, fiber channel SAN has a distinct advantage over IP-SAN, in terms of guaranteed performance management and better data protection. So, at this point of time, customers prefer fiber channel, though IP-SAN is logically cheaper as the cost of connectivity being lower because of Ethernet cards. As and when IP-SAN becomes more secure and can guarantee high performance, it will become more commonly deployed in business environments.

CP: What are the challenges facing successful information lifecycle management (ILM)?

SC: If we draw an analogy to ERP, for installing ERP, the organizational business process needs to be changed. The same holds true for ILM. A key challenge is that the customer needs to identify the most important parameter and value of information. ILM is not technology, but more of a process that needs to be followed, based on various parameters of management, availability, scalability, performance and cost.

CP: How do you see the storage industry evolving in India?

SC: Till a couple of years back, most of the storage systems were bought through server venders. However, customers are now understanding the value of powerful storage controllers, which can give them the management and performance factors that are very much essential in a storage solution. Leading service providers, whose businesses runs on IT - like banking, telecom, oil and gas industry, software houses -have chosen the technology that suits their needs best and then considered the integrator/partner who can deliver the 'chosen' solution to the customer.

CP: What role have you been playing and how do you see the way forward?

SC: Hitachi being a leading storage technology vendor in this area has a responsibility to develop the market by creating an awareness and educations programs about protecting customer data and increasing performance around storage environments. The key area to focus for HDS in the coming year will be the channels and fulfillment partners who have the responsibility to propagate the value-benefits of choosing the right storage solution to their valued customers for their respective enterprise.