Effective SAN - sans the prohibitive cost

Prashant Hebbar

BANGALORE:In a bid to rid the Storage Area Network (SAN) market of high costs and vendor monopolization, a group of eight companies are offering solutions at what they call ‘disruptive’ cost, and performance levels.

A typical entry-level SAN implementation today costs a couple of million dollars. However, the new initiative of "SAN to masses" is likely to peg it down to a few hundreds of thousand dollars. Driving this initiative is Mr Kumar Malavalli, co-founder of storage switch manufacturer, Brocade. Malavalli is an angel investor in these companies and lends bulk of his time helping these companies in management and product development areas. This loose set of companies working for a "common good" is Malavalli’s ‘ecosystem’ which plans to revolutionize the SAN market.

"Owing to prohibitive costs, SANs have been restricted primarily to Fortune 500 companies. Though, SANs are preferred over Direct Attached Storage (DAS) SMEs, due to business pressure are not able to invest," says Malavalli.

SAN market in the Fortune 500 universe is getting crowded by big vendors vying for the share and any new entrant is better off looking at newer markets. Moreover, to sustain itself as a viable technology SAN industry has to move to the mass market. That is what Malavalli is planning to do.

In a SAN implementation, the cost of software licensing for back-up and disaster recovery is said to be the reason for high costs. "We are offering a choice of hardware and software licenses so that users can cut costs by putting together an optimum solutions," says Malavalli. "We look at keeping the total cost of operations low," he adds.

As a result, each company in the ecosystem has a part to play. There is the Alpine Technologies based out of Dallas, developing a low cost and intelligent storage sub-system. Another US company Cloverleaf is working on quality of service. Other companies include SV Systems, Aarohi Communications and InterScan each working on specific technology or process. Kasten Chase is the only company that is a listed company and engaged in the hardware solutions.

Bangalore-based Apara Enterprise Solutions has been drafted to push "SAN to masses" initiative in India. Apara, a storage and IT infrastructure solution provider will be the ecosystems’ primary system integrator for this region. Malavalli has identified China too as a major market for his vision.