Today, information is the most important asset for an organization and losing this information can cause a lot of organizations to go out of business. Storage of enterprise data is no longer a simple case of saving the said data.
The exponential growth of data is a truism. The phenomenon has resulted from increased trading and business activities across major verticals of businesses. “Globally, data growth continues at an astronomical pace of approximately 50% per year. This is true in India too as India is an entrepreneurial society plus many organisations are investing here given the great prospects for the future,” says Jim Simon, Senior Director of Marketing Quantum Asia-Pacific.
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| Santhosh D’ Souza, Director- Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd India |
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| Jim Simon Senior Director of Marketing Quantum Asia-Pacific |
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| Amit Luthra, National Manager, Storage & Networking Solutions Marketing, Dell India |
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| Rajesh Rege, Sr Vice President - Data Centre, Cloud and Virtulaisation, Cisco India and SAARC |
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| Akhil Kamat, Platform Manager, Storage, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/SA |
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| Huzefa Motiwala, Country Head - Presales for Information Management at Symantec |
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| Surajit Sen, Country Manager - BRS at EMC |
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| P Sridhar Reddy, CEO & Founder, P Sridhar Reddy, CEO & Founder, CtrlS |
Exponential Growth of Unstructured Data and Digital Content
Factors responsible for fuelling this growth will be increased data, computing and business continuity needs of the enterprise segment. Disaster recovery solutions and regulatory compliance are also complementing the adoption of storage solutions among the enterprise segment.
Data or information recession is never going to happen. Today’s organisations are facing an exponential increase in the amounts of data driven largely by the explosion of unstructured data. It is well-known that power-point presentations, audio, video, images and other large digital files and unstructured data are growing much faster than structured information such as databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mail servers.
Today unstructured data is growing much faster than structured data. PowerPoint presentations, MP3s, Microsoft Word documents, the things that people use on their laptops and desktops -- all of this.
“For example, corporate-created video is taking off. Second, organisations are now of the opinion that they should save all of their data for future usage. This is because they are starting to realize that they can extract more value from their data. Today’s data will enable highly targeted, ie customized messages in the future. It will help identify patterns that can be used to solve problems in the medical and scientific fields,” says Jim Simon.
With the huge amount of data at their disposal, companies are realising the wealth of information that they can mine to gain insights into their customers, business processes etc., leading to greater demand for Business Intelligence and analytics services. Organizations will have the ability to not only harness data of all types as part of making proactive business decisions but also obtain more useful information for business insights, improve the fidelity of existing information through the process of validation, and improve time to decision making. “Big Data presents many possibilities for enterprises and today’s CIOs understand this and consider Big Data and Business Analytics a top priority,” says Rajesh Rege, Sr VIce President - Data Centre, Cloud and Virtulaisation, Cisco India and SAARC.
CIOs have the responsibility of providing the right tools and infrastructure to enable analytics and business intelligence that will improve business strategy, performance and profitability of the enterprise. Traditionally, the volume of data available to organizations was smaller and more structured. This data was generated from within the enterprise through or financial transactions and was stored within the enterprise’s applications like their CRM or ERP systems. “With the popularity of social media, online banking and shopping and a host of mobile devices sending millions of packets of data every day, the volume and range of data now available to enterprises is immense. Enterprises now have the opportunity to use this data to gain business advantage more than ever before,” says Amit Luthra, National Manager, Storage & Networking Solutions Marketing, Dell India.
Clustered Storage
Today, Data storage industry is witnessing a paradigm shift in the form of movement toward Clustered Storage architectures. In fact clustered storage has the potential of changing the rules of how data is stored, managed and accessed.
“Over a period of time, the growth of data has increased exponentially. With the emergence of different types of data forms, such as video on demand digital surveillance, which are classified as unstructured data, Clustered storage has come to the forefront of attention,’ says Akhil Kamat, Platform Manager, Storage, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/SA.
Changing Storage Landscape
Storage scenario has transformed for good in India. It has definitely changed from buying just a bunch of disks to features storages offer, software and integration capabilities it offers. Customers realize the need for smarter storage and IBM believes in making it efficient. “Clients are looking at compression of storage i.e. how to do more with less. Simplification of storage is important to avoid complexity. We at IBM have something called as Storage Infrastructure Optimization study wherein we tell our customers as to how they simplify their architecture,” explains Akhil Kamat.
SAN Vs NAS
According to a study, worldwide external disk storage systems Factory Revenue increased 2.3% during the fourth quarter of 2012 and 4.7% for the full year. The SAN market was said to have grown by 13.4% year on year. In the enterprise segment, the company addresses the enterprises with storage, among others. It is a provider of Ethernet-based storage.
American Megatrends which has been awarded around 50 patents for data storage innovations last year launched StorTrends 1301i in India. A 1U IP-SAN (Internet Protocol Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage appliance built on Intel architecture with StorTrends iTX Data Storage Software, StorTrends 1301i is an ideal storage solution for small offices and SMEs.
Both NAS and SAN provide network storage solutions. However, NAS is a single storage device that operates on data files, whereas SAN is a local network of multiple devices that operate on disc blocks. While a SAN normally uses Fibre Channel interconnects, a NAS makes Ethernet and TCP/IP connections.
However, due to the worldwide proliferation of Internet technologies like TCP/IP and Ethernet, some SAN products are making the transition from Fibre Channel to the same IP-based approach NAS uses. And with the rapid improvements in disk storage technology, today's NAS devices now offer capacities and performance that once were only possible with SAN. “These two industry factors have led to a partial convergence of NAS and SAN approaches to network storage,” says Amit Luthra, National Manager, Storage & Networking Solutions Marketing, Dell.
SAN and NAS developed to cater to differing application needs. At its very core, a SAN enables a storage array to carve out a slice of raw capacity and present it to a server which owns the space, manages it for applications/users and sends data to and receives data from the array as blocks. NAS enables a storage array to present a filesystem to a server or many servers, which then allow applications/users to read/write files in that filesystem, while the storage array manages the storage space. “Over time, various SAN and NAS access protocols have emerged in response to subtler requirements. For example, want to use block devices over an Ethernet medium? You can choose iSCSI or FCoE. The different needs remain relevant and will continue to exist in the future, thus begging the question of what the benefits of SAN and NAS are,” says Santhosh D’ Souza, Director- Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd India
As technology components and offerings evolve, consumers of enterprise IT products no longer are forced to predict how business growth or changes will affect storage architecture in the future. Questions like "Where will I need more capacity and performance – block level storage or file level storage?", "Which protocol should I bet on for SAN - FC, iSCSI or FCoE?" no longer need to be asked. NetApp for example has been delivering a truly unified storage for 11 years now, supporting both SAN and NAS architectures with support for all popular access protocols.
Disaster Recovery fuelling Storage demand
Disaster recovery solutions and regulatory compliance are complementing the adoption of storage solutions among the enterprise.
A recent survey shows that businesses are losing billions due to poor data disaster recovery planning. The lot is harder for the SMBs for whom it becomes all the more difficult to recuperate after a loss. Needless to say, an opportunity lies here for the IT service providers to offer disaster recovery services.
Surajit Sen, Country Manager - BRS at EMC, says, “For many companies Disaster recovery is an insurance policy that they did not think they required, until they needed it. But now there is the realisation that it is in the essential fitness of things to have a disaster recovery plan, especially from a compliance point of view.”
As organizations deal with downtime due to disasters, storage failures, network issues, maintenance or power outages, they need an off-premise solution that provides fast recovery to keep their applications and data available to users. “Symantec’s SMB DP survey found that one in two Indian organizations that adopted the cloud experienced improvements in disaster preparedness. Cloud-based services are gaining interest and traction in the Indian market due to reduced costs, flexibility, strong SLAs that guarantee that RTOs and RPOs, and reduced management overhead so Indian organisations are extensively adopting DR-as-a-Service,” says Huzefa Motiwala, Country Head - Presales for Information Management at Symantec
Though the market potential for India has not been evaluated through a comprehensive research, it is well understood that all Small, Medium and Large-sized technology-dependent enterprises will suffer heavy losses even from small data disruptions. “The present trends in this segment clearly indicate that there will be a meteoric rise in the growth of the data recovery industry. Natural disasters, risk to reputation and the need to stay competitive will push companies to adopt more robust Disaster Recovery Policies than mere compliance,” says P Sridhar Reddy, CEO & Founder, P Sridhar Reddy, CEO & Founder, CtrlS.
Disaster Recovery is important for everyone. Though not specific to the size of company or industry, it is an opportunity SMBs are looking for. While DRaaS is an advisable solution for any organization, the specific set of businesses to benefit from it can be SMBs, since they are usually not in a financial situation to support their own infrastructure. DRaaS gives them an option to establish some form of back up, as opposed to standing the risk of losing all their data in case disaster strikes. Besides, information is an asset for these organizations and they do not tend to realize it. Operating on a small scale doesn’t mean reduced damage in case the data is lost. This data needs to be protected, backed up and restored as in any organization.
Any technology-dependent business that would be affected by downtime should go for a cloud-based disaster recovery. This includes companies from verticals like BFSI, e-Commerce, Telecom, Inf rastructure, Media & Entertainment, Manufacturing, etc. Business Continuity Experts state that even small and regular outages affect profits of a business and shake customer confidence. A 24-hour disruption decreases the chance of a company’s survival by 50%. A 3-day disruption could close down a business completely.
Tape still Alive
The role of tape has been changing. It used to be as a target for backups because of its ability to be moved offsite, long shelf life, and unbeatable cost per gigabyte. These days, tape is just as likely to be found in a new role: one of archive. Organisations trust their backup to disk-based backup appliances that utilize deduplication and then replicate the data to a remote disk-based backup appliance over their WAN for offsite disaster recovery.
Demonstrating that tape is far from dead, a recent memo from the Tape Storage Council said that tape capacity shipments reached record levels in 2012, exceeding 20,000 PB, and are projected to grow more than 25 percent this year. It also reiterated that tape remains the most cost-effective storage technology for long-term data retention, with continued innovations in capacity, data accessibility, speed and reliability.
Economy Impact
The not-so-good economy is a challenge for many industries. “However, the storage industry was not really affected because the quantity and value of data continued to increase. IT organisations have never been more critical to their organisations’ success so investment continued because the return on investment was easy to calculate,” says Jim.
Added to this, with the growth engines coming from Indian entrepreneurs and more established organisations investing in India, the growth in storage was quite predictable and commendable.
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