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What are the other areas that Sun is working on?
Certainly the next piece is how to make sure that one is allowed to look at the data, how to record that someone looked at it and how to make sure that the data hasn’t been modified. We are now looking at these problems and have announced enhancements to Solaris with the ZFS file system, that allow us to now address zettabytes of data – that is a million terabytes.
On the operating systems side, we are also working at ensuring integrity of data from the server to the disk. We use a 64 bit key for this that we store separately from the data to ensure integrity of data. We also enhance it with the intelliSTOR platform to make sure that not one bit of data has been changed on that technology.
We also provide tools where we can encrypt the data on the server, we can provide external boxes along with the fiber channel and now with the tape technology, encrypt it on the device. Sun has the ability to encrypt to the level of tape cartridge so even if you lose the tape, the data will be safe.
The other area we are working on is compliance, which is very hot right now. Our new NAS appliance actually has a compliance feature, through which a company can authorize who is allowed to see the data, record every time somebody touches it and also give it a retention period. No one can delete the data, and companies have to destroy the disk drive to do so, so that is how rigorous we can be.
On the management side, Sun has a platform for management called the Enterprise storage management (ESM). This is a tool from the operation side to map out customer’s storage area network (SAN) and we are investing on that.
Other area would be taking advantage of is IP based storage. We had recently announced a preview of a technology called Honeycomb, which would change the way applications search for, access and retrieve data.
We are also working on a disk array code-named Thumper. It will be a second-tier, ATA-powered array, tailored for specific applications such as video file serving. We are also looking at technologies on how do we back up and are researching on continuous data protection (CDP), where companies can go back to any point of time and get the data, and plan to provide solutions in that area.
We also plan to add next-generation Zettabyte file system (ZFS), geared to automate tasks for storage administrators and increase data integrity, to a version of the Solaris 10 operating system shipping in June.
Sun is also in a big way with Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). There are a lot of committees proponing that open standards in storage is very important. Sun is also a member of APERI, a group that plans to develop products for managing storage devices based on common open-source software code.
What are the new trends that you see in the storage market?
On the technology side, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is definitely coming in. It is simple to implement on servers and we expect most internal drives for servers and PC space would probably be SAS within two years. One good thing was that SAS also took over the ATA protocol so I can plug in a serial ATA (SATA) drive or a SAS drive in the same port. Internally, this would lead to simplifying the structure.
We expect SAS to take over from low end fiber channels. iSCSI had the promise but hasn’t done much. On the IP based storage front – NAS and SAS, we are investing quite a bit on this technology as well.
Tape is growing contrary to popular belief that it is dying. When we look at our T9840 access drive, which is designed for applications that need to retrieve data quickly in a large amount of quantity, through this customers can access information on the basis of human speed. When you record everything on disk, in three years you need to replace everything because of the growth. But on tape you may add additional media but not replace everything. We can move tape very easily and for backup, restore it is very critical. Even if you have sophisticated remote technology, you still want the last line of defense to be the tape. I expect that both disk and tape will die at the same time.
There is a huge opportunity for tape because despite doubling the capacity on tape, still the storage needs are increasing phenomenally. In future, we expect to have five per cent data on fiber disk, 15 per cent on SATA and 80 per cent on tape. When we do this with our New File System, we have an affordable archival system. Here the system will automatically manage itself. The archival engine will stop the data when there is no space and move to tape and companies need to just add more tapes.
What kind of growth are you looking at in the India market? Is Sun also looking at tapping the India SMB segment for growth?
India is a significant growth market for us. Sophistication of IT is very high and the size of the companies is also phenomenal when we look at high-end customers. SMBs are also more sophisticated than even the US in certain cases.
Data growth in India is also very high- e.g. in telecom companies and banks, keeping track of information is a huge task given the sheer volume of people. The opportunity is significant for storage here.
Probably, in India we do sell quite a bit of high-end systems but we also see a trend being towards the mid range. Mid range market is more significant in storage and one reason is that you get the benefits of the high-end stuff at lower price points.
Enterprise segment has been growing for the last three-four years and the largest chunk of Sun revenues come from there. Since last year there is lot of spending happening in SMBs. So I foresee that our mid range is going to play an important role in Sun’s growth in India. We are seeing a lot of traction from our tier 2 partners also, which was non-existent before.
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