Unlike most other technology verticals, the Storage market was
insulated from the downturn. Well, year-on-year growth rates were
halved and spending slowed for a few months, but the explosive
growth of data continued. Organizations spent on optimization
technologies such as data deduplication, as well as on technologies
that facilitate better data management, backup and recovery. The
storage market was also quick to recover from the downturn; the
future looks bright with emerging verticals and new opportunities
for vendors.
According to Gartner, the overall storage market in 2008 was USD
242.4 million. In the JFM quarter ending March 2009 the market was
USD 52.8 million. In terms of absolute revenues, Gartner projects
2009 growth of 13 percent (over 2008). In 2007, the storage market
saw total revenues of USD 199.7 million growing 32 percent over the
previous year.
Says Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, StorageWorks
Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India, “There has
been a bit of a slowdown in storage growth in the last eight
months. Customers were postponing their buying, extending their
service contracts and making do with existing infrastructure. But
around May this year we saw the optimism come back to the industry.
There are more customers talking to us now and more deals being
closed in the market. I am optimistic that the next few quarters
will see increased spending on IT infrastructure.”
Traditionally, the banking and telecom segments are the biggest
spenders on storage. But, according to Gartner, the emerging
verticals are government and IT services. An industry observer says
the education sector will also spend on storage. Manufacturing
companies are also increasing investment in storage.
Shift in focus
Before the downturn enterprises focused on performance and
capacity. That meant spending was directed at the fastest and
latest systems offering the highest capacities. Enterprise
customers wanted all their data on expensive systems, regardless of
the frequency of access. However, the focus has shifted to
optimizing existing storage and capacity utilization.
Says Arun Rawtani, VP - Sales, India & SAARC, EMC,
“Now customers are looking at quickly accessing only the data
that is immediately required and putting the older data offline, on
less expensive media.” This is made possible by adopting a
tiered storage model enforced by Information Lifecycle Management
(ILM)—a set of policies and processes that align (storage)
infrastructure with business priorities.
Says Vivek Anand, Regional Director - India & SAARC, CommVault,
“The current economic scenario has forced customers to
explore the innovation in a storage solution. People want to grow
the business seamlessly without adding more equipment or more
complexity.”
New investments in storage are made with a strict view on ROI and
TCO. There is also a shift from CAPEX to OPEX models so CFOs are
asking not just about the cost of the storage solution, but also
about the cost of the complete ecosystem. Storage vendors are asked
questions like, “How much will it cost to power the storage
solution?”
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Analyst View
Aman Munglani, Principle Analyst, Global
Storage, Gartner
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 Technologies such as thin
provisioning, data deduplication, quality of service, tiered
storage and storage virtualization have been around for some time.
But we are yet to see large-scale adoption. The market is in a
phase where it is trying to understand what this technology can do
for them.
There are also some technology challenges which need to be
addressed. From a disk architecture perspective we see that 90
percent of the market uses scale-up architecture. What you are
going to see moving as regards scale-up, are incremental
advancements to the systems. This architecture has reached a zenith
in terms of the number of disk drives it can support.
However, scale-out as a technology is slowly making inroads. In the
last six to seven months we have seen storage vendors launching
products on scale-out architecture, which is now niche. These boxes
fit between the mid-range and high-end segments and are designed to
handle high capacity at the very best possible cost with high
bandwidth capabilities. Such products will become increasingly
available and will be deployed within the next couple of years.
The third alternative is commodity-based disk storage or open
storage solutions. We think this is going to have a very
significant impact moving forward. This architecture will have a
significant impact on bringing down the cost of storage. It will
simultaneously increase performance and provide the features and
functionality you would expect out of your systems.
The last alternative is having an integrated storage server. This
is a component that falls between the server and storage. This
architecture is more far-reaching. However, there is a lot of
speculation surrounding this technology and we will have to wait
and watch how it shapes up.
By 2013 technologies that will be pervasive are thin provisioning,
quality of service, intelligent power management and virtualized
back-end disks. We will also see automated SSDs and security for
individual applications. Automatic tiering systems and SAS (serial
attached SCSI) will make inroads into the fiber channel.
Storage virtualization is fairly expensive right now. There are
certain issues that need to be addressed such as software licensing
and a single point of failure. Because of these issues storage
virtualization in India hasn’t taken off yet. |
Spending priorities
Given this scenario it’s not hard to guess where the money is
being spent. There is demand for technologies such as data
deduplication, thin provisioning and storage virtualization (refer
to the story ‘Storage technologies to beat the
recession’ in Network Computing, May 2009). But with the
shift to the OPEX model organizations are seriously considering
other options.
“CFOs are looking to decapitilaze IT. More customers are
considering options like IT leasing, virtualization, capacity on
demand, managed services and SaaS,” says Anand of
CommVault.
Krishnamoorthy of HP observes customer spending in four areas.
“The first part of the investment is on storage arrays. The
second part goes towards the infrastructure that you require to
support storage networks. Thirdly, they are spending on data
protection. People invest in backup and in making it seamless.
Customers are also spending on replication. They spend on platforms
to build host-based applications.”
Adds EMC’s Rawtani, “We see investments going towards
the tiering of storage (ILM). Customers are also spending on
deduplication. They are also looking at deduplication at the
source. Thirdly, there is spending on server
virtualization.”
IP Storage
Benefits such as
cost, capacity, scalability and manageability make IP storage
attractive, especially in the SMB sector. Industry observers expect
higher adoption rates soon.
“In the next few quarters we’ll see increased
penetration of IP SANs. [Technologies like] iSCSI and IP-SAN
simplify deployment. The cost of infrastructure to support IP-SAN
will also come down,” says HP’s Krishnamoorthy.
“The technology to support IP SAN has matured. Earlier you
had point devices. Now we have virtualization of storage in the
IP-SAN market. All the benefits of FC-SAN are now available with
IP-SAN.”
Emerging opportunities
To stay
competitive businesses need high availability and uptime. They also
need to improve operational risks. So businesses will spend more on
backup and recovery solutions, perhaps choosing to outsource the
management of these services.
“We see a huge opportunity for Business Continuity and
Disaster Recovery solutions, especially in the government sector.
Three-way DR in a star [topology] will become common,” says
EMC’s Rawtani.
Says Krishnamoorthy of HP, “We observe that 80 percent of an
organization’s data is actually outside the data center. We
see the next big opportunity in managing unstructured
data.”
Physical security is also gaining importance in the country and the
demand for IP-based surveillance systems will grow. Because of the
high volume of data generated by this application one would require
NAS boxes that offer high scalability and performance.
The digital entertainment industry will also have a high
requirement for scalable NAS solutions. Animation production
companies, for instance, generate enormous amounts of data.
The demand for storage is also picking up in the SME sector where
businesses are looking to deploy scaled-down versions of ERP and
PLM. Vendors anticipate a demand for SANs even in the SMB
segment.