BANGALORE, INDIA: Quoting IDC's recent report, Praveen Dasale, VP & MD, LSI, notes: “Storage capacity will continue to grow at 50 per cent a year till 2017. Moreover, network traffic over WAN will continue to grow at 42 per cent a year till 2012. This calls for networkisation of storage.” He was speaking to CIOL in an interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you elaborate upon networkisation of storage?

Praveen Dasale: Our large end focus is towards what we call as networkisation of storage, which essentially allows us to place all the advantages of networking and storage together.

If you look at the current architecture, networking and storage is very segmented and different. Typically, when you put together data centres or design enterprise stuff within data centre, you tend to keep them separate.

However, if you look at emergence of new technologies, such as virtualization and cloud, you cannot do virtualization and cloud computing effectively, if you don't take care of networking elements along the way for the efficiency of storage.

Today there are a lot of internal focus on the emergence of SSDs and flash storage, which actually allows you to separate storage cleanly from server.

This means that hypothetically if you look at servers today they have some amount of local storage because you do not want storage sitting away from server, which can create performance penalty if the servers have to wait for the data to get there when the server is down.

You can replace this native storage, or hard drive storage in server, such as SSDs, flash, and then have the remaining large or old storage, which can be either stored at the other end of data centre or even outside data centre in the cloud.

For this you need to take care of optimizing each and every networking component which allows the transport of that storage data in a secured form. This can happen only when you networkise your storage.

CIOL: What are the storage and networking scenario, especially when data over the WAN is growing in multifolds?

PD: A decade back, contribution of enterprise companies like LSI, Intel to utilize the wide area network (WAN) bandwidth was very high at 80-90 per cent.

Over the years, Internet-based applications, such as Web 2.0, has created a huge surge of unstructured data (video, audio, collaboration within web 2.0, etc), which has in turn increased the contribution of individuals on the WAN by multifolds.

This unstructured data is causing significant amount of difficulties for Internet service providers (ISVs) because their network is built to manage enterprise data, which is typically structured. Now they have to update their network to handle this unstructured data as well.