Storage landscape in 2010
Most of the storage firms are of the view that some trends in storage that have gained a strong foothold will persist in 2010.
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.
Storage solution vendors are of the opinion that the storage market will take a turn for the better by 2010, with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are recognizing the importance of storage solutions. Although direct attached storage (DAS) solutions are expected to compete head-on against storage solutions in the SME sector due to their low initial costs, network storage provides better returns in the long term.
According to Surajit Sen, Channels, Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India, Virtualized storage, deduplication, Solid state storage and scale out storage are some of the key trends in the storage industry. Sandeep Dutta, Vice President, Enterprise Storage, IBM India/ South, sees major shifts and adaptation towards the Storage virtualisation and consolidation, Data Deduplication, Infrastructure Management.
“As enterprises realize the interdependence of data growth with storage, the concept of network storage is becoming transparent. To avail the benefits of mobile environment enterprises are looking at secure means to store their information and access the same when needed. Today, organizations are open to considering storage as a critical component of the datacenter,” says Cisco.
Today’s business leaders are asking data centers to provide better responsiveness, energy efficiency, and performance than ever before, often with lower budgets and a shortage of qualified staff. This is an enormously difficult challenge because it requires data center managers to evaluate and address each of these factors across multiple technology components such as applications, compute platform, network infrastructure, and storage systems to create a comprehensive solution.
Data centers need a more efficient operating model that views all resources as an integrated and unified entity, so targeted investments can add greater value across all business and technology areas.
All levels of data center functionality must be addressed and included in the master architecture plan. Data center managers must evaluate current designs to determine how to best virtualize and consolidate applications, servers, storage, and switching functions, while placing a continuing emphasis on maintaining a dynamic, flexible, and efficient data center environment.
Storage area networking, particularly switch technology, has seen numerous changes in recent years. Specifically, switches have necessarily become more complex to match increasing fabric functionality requirements.
According to Cisco, the goal of storage services and support is to promote customer success with storage technology. Some of the key goals for storage specialists include:
• To deliver a consistently high level of storage area network (SAN) performance and availability, and supports growing information management needs
• Optimize SAN infrastructure based on the Cisco technology, which consolidate SAN islands into a secure, manageable solution that supports business continuance and disaster recovery for intelligent storage fabric applications
• To speed up the identification and resolution of SAN issues after the initial deployment, and help ensure optimal performance in a dynamic environment
Storage for SME
Data storage in the SME market saw many changes in 2009. Many storage vendors made alterations in their product portfolio to fit the specific needs of an SME. Virtually every storage vendor is going after the SMB, or SME, market. “SMBs contribution to the overall storage market in terms of revenue is small at present, however the SMC market is extremely important as it helps expand the footprint across a larger customer base many of which would become enterprises in the next 5-10 years,” says Surajit Sen.
“Symantec is the protection "thought leader" with the right set of security solutions and products to address the needs of small and medium sized businesses as well as enterprise class,” says Anand Naik.
Symantec has a significant number of SMB clients and given Symantec’s unique set of offerings and thought leadership. The company is witnessing the strongest growth from this segment of the market across verticals.
Symantec has a portfolio of market-leading technology designed for small and mid-sized businesses to help them adapt to evolving business requirement as well as specific solutions for enterprise class.
Symantec provides a range of consulting, technical education, and support services that guide organizations through the migration, deployment, and management of the solution and help them realize the full value of their investment.
NetApp has a 3 pronged strategy to address the SME market comprising Products, Partner & Program. The storage firm has released bundles of our entry level product FAS2020 which offer a great value at very attractive price points. “We have introduced a new category of partners called the “Silver Partner’ category. We have designed an enablement plan and support plan to back up these bundles through these partners through trainings, sales incentives, rebates programs,” says Surajit Sen.
IBM has been extremely successful in addressing the needs and demands of the SMB’s. Midsized organisations in a variety of industries, including retail, healthcare, insurance, government and manufacturing, are facing the same issues as larger organisations, which is managing, storing and securely analysing an ever-increasing flow of data. “We recently introduced an enterprise-level storage solution for midrange businesses. The IBM System Storage DS5020 Express, a new storage disk offering that delivers enterprise-class storage capabilities for midrange businesses,” says Sandeep Dutta.
The IBM System Storage DS5020 delivers the high performance, availability and solutions to midrange businesses that enterprise customers are accustomed to, yet at a price point that's designed for midmarket organizations. The System Storage DS5020 Express disk system includes an industry leading 8 Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) as well as iSCSI host capability that seamlessly integrate into existing and new infrastructures, while providing the balanced performance needed to satisfy the mixed workloads created by consolidation. Balanced performance supports the needs of consolidated or virtualised environments such as IBM PowerVM, Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 4, while delivering outstanding response times.
Cloud computing opportunity
Cloud computing is often used as a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud storage serves to mask the complexity of IT infrastructure and enables access to storage capacity as “a pay as you grow” service.
The cloud will continue to grow in awareness into 2010 with a continued focus by private cloud builders and public cloud service providers on elasticity, reliability, multi-tenancy and security. We expect an increasing adoption of cloud storage as advancements are made on key capabilities such as security, multi-tenancy, and payment models.
Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in the cloud. “Today large enterprises are looking at reducing the OPEX and CAPEX costs of their DC and we are seeing a natural progression and paradigm shift in networked storage market to cloud/virtualized storage, which we are referring to as Storage 3.0.,” says HDS.
Symantec uses a broad definition of cloud computing that encompasses many elements. The company believes there are multiple layers within the cloud paradigm – the application layer or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the middleware layer or Platform-as-a-Service and the flexible cloud infrastructure layer or Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Symantec provides a number of SaaS and hybrid offerings today and is well-positioned to enable scalable and secure Cloud infrastructures. “We offer hosted services for any organization wishing to outsource the complex and time-consuming management of certain business processes or organizations wishing to expand into a hybrid model using a combination of both onsite and online services to increase their operational flexibility,” says Anand Naik.
“We will continue to invest in SaaS offerings across the product portfolio, leveraging Symantec technology in data loss prevention, compliance, endpoint security and archiving,” adds Anand Naik.
Symantec’s storage, security, and management solutions that are used to manage data centers today are the same solutions needed to evolve data centers towards cloud model and allow customers to gain the cost-efficiencies of cloud computing.
The Cloud Ecosystem comprises of 3 types of players. The Cloud Enablers, The Cloud Service Providers and the Consumers of Cloud Services. NetApp belongs to the first category. “We offer solutions that offer Extreme Flexibility, Outstanding Efficiency and Proven Expertise,” says Surajit Sen.
In November 2008, IBM announced its largest launch ever of new storage hardware, software and services that will enable businesses, governments and other institutions to transform static data into more dynamic information that is accessible in a cloud computing environment. Backed by an investment of $2 billion over three years, the new portfolio has further strengthened IBM’s position as the world’s leading provider of information infrastructure offerings.
Finally…
Greater storage efficiency continues to be an urgent priority for companies of every size and we see this need rising within the large-sized enterprises that are especially focused on lowering costs; satisfying growing application performance needs.
“Enterprises are looking for storage architecture that lowers TCO while improving ROI by ustilising lower-cost, best-of-breed, multi-drive servers and storage such as using a common SAS interface and self-encrypting drive capabilities. This reduces storage complexity and enables peace of mind for the IT Manager, simplifying administration by reducing the number and types of devices being managed,” says Seagate.
Rajesh Khurana
Country Manager of India and SAARC
Seagate Technology
New consumer devices, such as high-definition TVs, portable game systems, home media servers, entertainment systems and multi-function cell phones, are fuelling demand for more digital storage. These devices and their applications need hard disk drives or external storage solutions that act as a source pool for their digital contents.
The constant proliferation of user-generated contents and the broadband usage are great opportunity factors for the industry. It is now becoming an “on-demand” society where people give and take contents anywhere, anytime. At the back-end of all this will be a huge eco-system of digital content behind the scenes - with storage at the heart of it. It means that SMBs and enterprises are also looking for powerful yet simple storage solutions that enhance business and operational continuity for end-users and reduces the complexity and cost. It also means that consumers need secure storage solutions that they can easily store, manage and share their priceless digital contents.
With disk drives showing significant leaps in capacities, the improvement in cost per gigabyte, performance, reliability and energy efficiency such as we see from Seagate’s Barracuda, Momentus, Savvio and Cheetah families, we will continue to see further growth of the industry.
Another interesting thing to note is that while consumers have rapidly embraced digital formats for the download, capture and playback of music, photos and videos, most of that content is currently trapped on their home or laptop computers. We feel there is a lot of potential for us in the market, such as in bridging the gap between the computer and home entertainment system in the easiest, non-technical way possible as we do with our new FreeAgent Theater+ HD media player.
Sumit Mukhija
National Sales Manager
Cisco India and SAARC
Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the cost of storing and managing data while the volume of data that needs to be stored is growing exponentially. Inefficient storage designs have resulted in very low utilization of resources. Through migration of older environments and consolidation of dispersed storage area networks (SAN) islands a significant improvement in utilization and availability and reduction in complexity can be achieved.
A top priority for many service providers today is entering the market for cloud computing services. A number of service providers are starting with "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS) offerings that enable their customers to run workloads on the provider's infrastructure. Storage and storage area network (SAN) tier is the first tier of physical resources depicted. This tier includes equipment designed to decouple storage from the compute tier and consolidate it for maximum efficiency. Also in this tier is the networking equipment required to connect the now decoupled storage capacity from the processing capacity in the compute tier.
The baseline architecture for the Cisco Unified Service Delivery solution consists of network, storage, and compute resources deployed in a uniform fashion so that it is able to support a broad range of applications and services across the provider's portfolio. Cisco MDS Family of storage networking equipment facilitate storage consolidation in conjunction with partner solutions from companies such as EMC.
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