Secondary storage is on the rise

"Secondary storage is on the rise"

Jay Kidd, senior VP, GM, Emerging Products Group, NetApp

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

What kind of areas does the emerging products division work on?

We have a few 100 people working on non-core engineering products. One of them is the storage security business division Decru. We build encryption and key management solutions for enterprise data centers. Then we also do business in virtual tape libraries. We have a product called StoreVault, which is only sold in the US, Australia and UK markets now.

This targets low-end customers (those who spend $10,000 and less on storage), a segment that NetApp has never tapped in the past. We created this separate business since we knew that the business practice for these customers had to be different from that of core customers.

The fourth business unit under the division comes from an acquisition we made in December last year that helps in heterogeneous data replication between any two-vendor storage arrays.

What are the new storage trends you have come across in the market?

JK: The first is the rise of secondary storage. Customers are realizing that the spend on secondary storage is increasing. Therefore vendors are getting opportunities to penetrate customer accounts for managing secondary data storage. This wasn't the case before. The growth of the smart copy is a real trend.

The second trend is the impact of storage virtualization. VMware is changing the structure of the data center. Server virtualization is driven by cost savings, space savings and power savings. We see customers who go from having 100 physical servers each of which are only 5 per cent utilized to 10 physical servers that have 100 virtual machines.

VMware is already in this space and now Microsoft has entered the space and so has Citrix. But there are challenges. When you take 100 servers- each of them has its own data - and then try to consolidate the data down to 10, the data isn't going to fit. It has to go on to external storage. So use of snapshots and data mirrors on storage arrays is becoming more common.

NetApp helps customers in both these areas-providing data snapshots and also provision data more rapidly than the competition.

What are your thoughts of management of heterogeneous storage?

Customers are consolidating data centers and within the data centers, they are consolidating storage. This is because it is difficult to hire a lot of people. If you have 15 data centers it is difficult to hire storage experts to manage all these centers. It is better to consolidate than get more expertise. The challenge is when they bring all the equipment to a single location.

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