Market interest and acceptance of scale-out storage systems in the Asia-Pacific is seeing a slow uptake, but awareness is still a concern, reveals a recent Gartner report on scale-out storage. Accurate planning of storage resources is a challenge that many organizations have to deal with, generating increased interest in scale-out systems.

As per the report, the capacity growth in India is expected to be in the range of 85 percent on a year-on-year basis in 2011, and growth will be driven by a combination of factors, which includes replacement buying, large mega deals within the government segment, the growth within the small-and-midsize-business segment and private cloud deployments.

The report cites cost containment and efficiency of resources as major issues that CIOs across the Asia-Pacific region continue to grapple with. “Earlier CIO used to over provision their storage requirement. But now due to cost constraints and tight IT budget, the CIO wants to buy just in time. They want flexibility in the infrastructure so that they can easily scale up and down as per the requirement,” said Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner.

Gartner believes that the design approach of scale-out disk storage systems reduces hardware development and manufacturing costs, and it can provide emerging storage vendors with strong marketing and channel advantages. It will also enable portfolio companies such as Dell, HP, IBM and Oracle to leverage their investments in server technologies, service and support, and spare parts depots.

Scale-out disk storage systems usually cost less than high-end monolithic frame-based scale-up disk storage systems on a dollars-per-terabyte basis. Also, they are capable of improving IT management's ability to provide timely provisioning, greater resource utilization, required performance, and higher levels of data and system availability.

Another of the drivers for scale-out storage is that many CIOs believe that networked storage environments (scale-up storage area networks [SANs]) can scale up only to a certain point. It is rarely possible for a single disk system to scale up to the extent of meeting all the storage needs of an enterprise.

According to the report, in general, the maturity of buyers in the Asia-Pacific is still low. However, a number of potential cloud storage providers in the region are looking to deploy scale-out disk storage systems rather than scale-up storage systems. Commenting on the trend Munglani said, “Secure multitenancy and expandability of infrastructure are important discussion points within the cloud provider space. Hence, cloud computing vendors and service providers are using scale-out storage. For example, in India, HCL, a large service provider, is using NetApp equipment installed as scale-out.”