Storage players vie for SMB pie

Bangalore:The storage industry is presently in an introspective mode. While the demand for storage is growing by leaps and bounds, targeting the huge wealth of technology to the right market is where the challenge lies. In India alone, the demand for storage systems is growing at the rate of 17 percent per year, and has zoomed from $134.6 million in 2000 to $425.8 million in 2005.

Rising compliance mandates concern over security and necessity for back up and disaster recovery and growth of outsourcing in countries like India and China have been some of the driving factors. Indian manufacturing units, which are benchmarking internal processes to meet international standards, are also leading this storage demand.

Big storage players, which were so far content in their ivory tower of catering to large enterprises, are now coming down to have a slice of action in the exciting small and medium business (SMB) space. But the task has hardly been easy. Said consulting analyst and founder of the Taneja Group in the USA Arun Taneja, which focuses on storage technology consulting, "Big companies tried to get to this market (SMB) by taking their large solutions and clipping
them to size and removing some features. It does not work that way."

SMBs require simple and easy-to-manage solutions that need to be built from ground up. To be cost-effective, vendors would need to take care of not merely material costs but also that of management. Realizing this, EMC, which recently acquired Dantz Development is betting on the latter's back-up software solutions aimed at the SMB sector.

Technologies like IP storage and iSCSI are also getting traction among small enterprises. Fiber channel vendors who were hitherto quite complacent about their technology are waking up to this challenge. Taneja said, "Fiber channel provides high performance at a high price while iSCSI provides acceptable performance at an affordable price for SMBs." Now these players are trying to strike a balance between the two.

At the recently concluded Storage Networking Summit (SNS) in Bangalore, most industry experts felt that start-ups and small storage players now have a chance to bring in disruptive technology into this under explored territory.

Towards Utility

With the industry moving towards commoditization, experts believe that software and value added services would be the distinguishing factor. "Software is what will really drive the way storage gets adopted and utilized across the enterprise," said co-founder of Brocade and chairman of the SNS Kumar Malavalli. And sure enough companies are already pushing their software prowess.

Since the last two years, EMC is pursuing the inorganic route to buy software companies like Documentum and Legato. Explaining the rationale, EMC software group senior VP Mark Sorenson said, "We realized a few years back, that we had all our eggs in one basket. Now, we have a 50 -50 split between storage hardware on one hand and software and services on the other."

In India, the market is still Direct Attached Storage (DAS) focused. While IP storage is also picking up in the SMB space, DAS would still prevail thanks to compliance and archival-related needs.

Future trends

The wide and varied options like NAS, SAN, ILM, fiber channel and iSCSI have only complicated buying decisions for customers. Storage companies are working on simple and affordable solutions to reduce the complexity. Director of SNS Brenda Christensen, who serves on the board of storage companies like Cloverleaf Communications and Indian SI firm Apara, contends that with the plethora of vendors and hardware options available, in future, the onus of storage management could fall on service providers and telcos.

The tiered storage model, which entails employing various types of solutions based on the nature of the process, could also gain traction. For instance, FC SAN could be deployed for mission critical data while IP SAN could be used for secondary purposes while offline data could be stored on optical or tape devices. Buzzwords like Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and virtualization are tossed around for good measure.

Despite the forecasts of tech soothsayers, experts contend that it would take a while. "The concept of virtualization is complex and is at the heart of the next generation movement. However, most of the big players are concerned about this technology since it allows the user to be in control of all vendor products," believes Taneja.