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BANGALORE: The concept of virtualization is fast gaining ground among enterprises. Network storage solution provider NetApp looks to leverage this opportunity by offering to simplify the customer's data storage problems and requirements, rather than manage the data. It plans to expand the India support team as well, and introduce product management and technical marketing in the country.
Suresh Vasudevan, senior vice president, product management, NetApp, talks about the intricacies of moving to a virtualized environment and its returns, in a discussion with Sigi Achappa of CIOL. Excerpts from an interview:
CIOL: How can enterprises reduce the complexity of their storage infrastructure?
Suresh Vasudevan: What we normally see in enterprises these days are islands of storage, which are manifested in different ways. This usually happens when you have a NAS and SAN that are different and do not leverage of each other. Now, within a single storage system, real utilization of data is just 30-40 percent. That is, merely 30-40 percent of the capacity is used to store data.
Another case is load balancing where there are a number of storage devices - databases, simulation architecture, etc., where only some are over utilized, while others are under utilized. We observed that storage technologies have tended to scale up and not scale out.
The problem here is storage management - managing all of these devices. In a multi-vendor scenario, each vendor has multiple management approaches. Different people think of virtualization as a solution to different set of problems. However, most customers do not look at it like a NAS or a SAN problem. Single architecture is a big driver of growth.
The second issue is utilization of storage space. A user may not use all the space that is allotted. Most of the time, 70 percent of the container is going waste. Hence, the storage technology must enable shrinking. If shrinking is not done online, it becomes extremely complex for a company.
During data migration most customers do not migrate from small volumes to larger volumes, but allot larger volumes. NetApps has a operating system, where volumes, instead of being fixed, can re-size volumes on the fly. It is not fixed to the underlying disks.
The third problem is that there are multi vendor applications that work uniquely as a solution in any large data center. There is a need to virtualize cross-vendor applications - EMC router, IBM, etc. The NetApps V series is an application that sits in front of EMC, IBM, HP or Hitachi arrays. Once deployed, it mirrors the data providing volume, rather talk to an IBM system. It avoids the need to manage multiple vendor systems. It can virtualize both NAS and SAN data.
With virtualization, the complexity of how to standardize across virtualization applications provided by different vendors again arises. It is still not clear as to whether to interface across the system. The industry is not there yet. We need a combination of virtualization systems, but APIs and standards are required as well.
CIOL: What is the transition that takes place when moving to a virtualization environment?
SV: There is a virtualized storage infrastructure across multi-vendor systems. With the amount of new applications, storage capacity is growing by 60 percent. At any point, you are managing ten times more data with new technologies and new deployments. Evolving from a homogeneous environment, multi-vendor virtualization is extremely new to the industry. It is an emerging technology and will take the next two to three years to get standardized.
CIOL: How will virtualization affect storage hardware vendors?
SV: Currently, the virtualization vendors - NetApp, IBM, EMC and Hitachi -- are all part of the system. Over time, it will depend on how they can adapt to customer requirements. However, with regard to tapes, the biggest dynamic affecting the tape is that it is a commodity-based technology - much lower cost, higher density, is able to store a lot more, but is low in reliability.
In case of desktop storage, it has scaled from 12TB to 96TB in three years. Desktop class drives are reliable. Disk based backup was a foreign concept. Now, more and more companies have offsite archives, where they copy the tape and store it in safe bunker for long-term storage. Onsite backups are moving to disk based. Regulated data is also moving to disk-based storage. Tapes will still be used, but more for storing less critical data than for critical data.
CIOL: Do you see storage and security getting unified?
SV: We believe heavily on that. There are three layers where a company thinks about security - perimeter security - that secures corporate information from people outside the company. Firewalls, VPN, anti-virus, etc., take care of threats from outside the company. According to a CSI report, about 50-80 percent of the threats emanate form within an organization.
Secondly, there is AAA security - authentication, authorization and auditing. Our acquisition of Decru, addresses the third layer, which is encryption. We believe that sooner or later, every company will move in this direction. Data will be stored in encrypted files.
As of now, we are selling the Decru software as independent units. Over time the storage system will have more knowledge. It will be possible to integrate at few points. We are currently looking at maximizing the deployment of encryption technology.
Over the last several years, we have grown at 30 percent YOY. The growth rate has been far higher than EMC, which has grown at 18-19 percent. This is because we address the data management problem, which is not just about storage capacity. We look at how we can simplify data storage, disaster recovery and backup.
We see security as an increasing problem. We try to get a solid understanding of the customer problem. We win largely because we simplify the problem, rather than manage the data.
CIOL: With multi-vendor disk environment come problems like multi-path drivers. How does virtualization improve flexibility and lower TCO?
SV: It is cumbersome to do data migration in the background and not disrupt applications and lock-in. There is a hierarchy of storage functions such as backup, disaster recovery, migrating with different standards, etc. It is a long road getting to a truly virtualized storage infrastructure.
CIOL: Going forward what is your focus for the next two years and also your plans for India?
SV: Our core product - Net Cash's support group in India is being expanded over the last few months. We are currently working on four different product lines that have substantial engineering done from India. We are planning to expand R&D and other functions to India. The current work consists of data management, SAN, etc. The India Group will be working more on areas in the next phase - not just R&D, but functions such as product management, technical marketing.
Our focus is to be the leader among open system storage companies. The single architecture system that can solve multiple customer problems has worked really well. We aim to be among the top three open system storage providers in the next 18 months.
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