Storage Matters

Storage has been the center of attraction for many years now and one of the reasons is that it's evolved with the times

Sunday, December 18, 2005

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According to some astrologers, this is the time when Mars is as close as it can ever be to Earth. Throw in a bit of Greek mythology, and it spells a lot of terror, because Mars is the God of war. Whether the mythology is anything to go by or not, one thing's for sure, this has been the year of natural disasters, whether it was Katrina that completely devastated New Orleans or the earthquake that shook Kashmir and took so many lives. Who can forget the floods in Gujarat and Mumbai, which caused such huge losses to businesses and property or the storms and lashing rains in Bangalore soon afterwards? Who knows where disaster will strike next? Mars is not expected to distance itself for a few more months if that's any consolation to the 'believers'. Even if you're not superstitious, this year has been a wake up call to all businesses. So it's time to figure out the loss to your business should another disaster strike, and plan a disaster-recovery strategy or business-continuity plan. Do you just need your data safe, or do you want your business to be running immediately after a catastrophe? If it's the former, then you need some form of an offsite back-up solution, while for the latter, you need a remote DR site that can take over quickly should the primary site go down. Whatever the plan, you can't afford to ignore storage, because that's the heart of any disaster recovery or business continuity plan. You have to choose an appropriate storage solution depending upon what type and volume of data you need to store.

Storage has been the center of attraction for many years now and one of the reasons is that it's evolved with times. In fact, storage is perhaps one of the few segments that has grabbed every possible opportunity and made use of it. Take disaster recovery for instance, the concept is nothing new. In fact, it's been there for ages, and yet it picked up only after the 9/11 attack. This was further reinforced with the concept of remote DR sites. Companies don't only have to back up their precious data to local storage only, but they also have the option of doing it to a remote location over a leased link. There are lots of other examples besides this, which have kept the storage industry on its toes.

Storage and compliance
Compliance became a major concern for US companies after HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley acts were introduced. Even Indian companies catering to international clients had to worry about compliance to these two acts as well. The storage industry identified compliance as an opportunity and created a need for good storage solutions for effective data management. They were no longer selling dumb storage boxes, but intelligent information management solutions. With HIPAA, storage vendors introduced Information Lifecycle Management or ILM, which stored and managed data right from its creation to its deletion. With Sarbanes Oxley, ILM was reinforced, but besides that, e-mail archiving also picked up. So ILM is still hot, and organizations should consider doing it from the point of managing their information properly.

Tech/Influence

Momentus Seagate Seagate has introduced a 2.5 inch notebook hard drive that uses perpendicular recording technology that enables its capacity to reach 160 GB, without increasing the power consumption or heat dissipation. This will take care of the storage needs of mobile executives.

Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive  Hard drive capacities have reached a half a Terabyte, and the manufacturers are finding different ways of marketing them. Take this one for instance, wherein Maxtor has created a back-up solution for SMBs.

NetApp FAS270C Network storage products that can work either as a standalone NAS or as a part of a SAN were visible this year. This device from NetApp, which we reviewed in March this year supports an array of 14 hot swappable disks. It's powered by NetApp's ONTAP 7G OS, which allows dynamic storage virtualization. What that means is that you can whatever volumes you create on this device can be dynamically resized as per the requirements.

E-mail archiving
This is a key trend today, and not without good reason. Most official communication happens over e-mail today, which means it can be used as legal evidence should the need arise. It's, therefore, very important to back up all the important email. That may not sound like much at one glance, so let's do some calculations. Even if a single employee gets 1 GB of e-mail a month, you can imagine the storage requirements. If a company has 100 employees, then that's 100 GB of e-mail a month, meaning 1200 GB per year. You would need to store it for at least five years, which translates to 60,000 GB of e-mail! Where do you store all of it? You could back it up to tape as that would be more cost effective since tape is still cheaper than disk. To add further complexity in the matter, a lot of companies allow their employees to use e-mail for personal communication needs as well. If your company allows that, then you would have to take some tough decisions on whether you'd like to continue allowing it or change the policy. This space will see more action next year, so stay tuned and work out your plans.

Storage virtualization
There are three types of virtualization-servers, storage and network. Out of these, server virtualization has really picked up this year, with some pretty good solutions are available from IBM, VMWare, Microsoft, McAfee and several open source communities. Storage virtualization has been talked about for a long time, but is still an emerging technology. Very few large enterprises across the world have implemented it. However, it is picking up, and one should see more action on this next year. The technology is supposed to let you combine various pools of storage and show them as one, so you can manage them from a central location as well. This can really help reduce management overheads and save costs. Should you be concerned about it? If you're running a data center with disparate storage resources, then you should definitely take a closer look. Even if you're planning to move all remote applications from your branch offices to a data center, you'll need to set up a separate storage network. Here again, you might like to look at doing storage virtualization from the beginning itself.

Other trends that matter
One thing that emerges from all this is that storage has become ubiquitous. Whether you're a consumer or an enterprise buyer, storage touches your life in some way. If you're an enterprise, then you should look at storage solutions from an information management point of view. Not all information is equally important, so everything need not be stored on the same type of storage medium.

Another area of concern that's picking up is storage security, which you need to pay special attention to next year. For consumers, storage is crawling under all digital gadgets, whether it's digital cameras, MP3 players camcorders, DVD-players and even automobiles.

Drilling deeper, a lot of what you see today is happening because the cost of individual storage elements is coming down, and capacities increasing. Seagate for instance, introduced its perpendicular recording technology this year, which will allow them to increase the capacity of their drives quite a bit. They launched their 2.5 inch Momentus drive for notebooks, with 160 GB capacity using this technology. That really takes care of all the storage needs of a mobile executive. Regular hard drive capacity has already touched 500 GB, which makes it easier to build multi-Terabyte NAS boxes.

Much more has happened in storage this year this year, but we're restricted in talking about it due to the space crunch. We will be back again next month with another more in depth story on storage.

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