Business

Storage: time to say the `V' word

THE NEW name in the data storage game is "utility computing'' and the way to go about it, without shortening the life spans of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), is to "virtualize.''

This was the message at the end of analyst firm IDC's day-long "Storage Vision'' for India in 2004 held here last week.

Storage players Veritas, IBM and Storage Tek in their presentations, all stressed that "Utility Computing'' — a business model in which a service provider makes computing and infrastructure management available to the customer as and when needed, and charges them according to usage — could usefully be extended to the data storage and security business.

"Information Technololgy must deliver an accountable and chargeable service'' said Singapore-based Raymond Goh, Senior Solution Architect with Veritas South Asia. Sailesh Agarwal, IBM's country manager for Storage Solutions said much the same thing: "IT is no more a cost centre, but a revenue centre.'' He did not go so far as to say like Michael Douglas in that classic film of the business world, "Wall Street,'' that "Greed is good,'' but he came close: "Let's make money!'' This went down well with the assembled lounge suits. But while they were whipping out their mobile phones to do some quick maths, they heard the dreaded "V'' word. "Virtualization'' was the way to go before they all headed for the bank, Long whispered in the storage industry, it's now alright to come out and say it: "Virtualization is the presentation of a single interface to users that provides a logical view of data or storage devices different from the way data or storage is physically configured.''

For those in the audience who were uncomfortable with all this jargon, speakers explained that it was possible — using software `jadoo' that companies like Veritas specialised in — to use relatively inexpensive, commodity disk and tape drives as well as a masala mix of legacy hardware — and to manage them as virtual storage pools, without having to bother where they physically resided.

IDC India's Hardware Research Group Manager Sanjit Sinha — had the hard core numbers on India's storage industry: The vast majority of Indian corporates still used the older direct attached storage (DAS) technology (57 per cent) while Networked storage (Storage Area Network: 30 per cent; Network Attached Storage: 13 per cent) was as yet a nascent area. IDC forecasts that Indian disk storage shipments that were just a whisker under 4,000 terabytes (TB) in 2003, were poised to explode and reach 52,700 TB by 2008. (One terabyte is a million megabytes or one million million bytes or chunks of data).

Mr. Sinha raised an amber signal for those wishing to rush out and buy a tera byte or two: "Managing the capacity is a bigger challenge that buying it.'' He also provided a checklist of technologies to watch in the near future of storage. They included.

- The iSCSI standard for storage networking.

- Serial ATA disks for affordable fixed content storage.

- Blade Servers for higher density.

- Serial SCSI disks to replace parallel SCSI.

- Network storage controllers to add intelligence to storage management.

Anand Parthasarathy

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu