$20 billion opportunity in SAN: Kumar Malavalli

NEW DELHI: There is a 100 per cent annual growth in data storage with $0. 80

of each IT server/ storage dollar spent on storage by 2003. The Storage Area

Network (SAN) infrastructure opportunity is likely to be $ 20 billion by 2004

said Brocade Communications Systems Inc., USA co-founder and chief technology

officer Kumar Malavalli.

Kumar Malavalli was the keynote speaker at a seminar on ‘Trends in

SAN", organized at Bangalore by Satyam Computer Services Ltd. on August 19.

He spoke on "Evolution of Fibre Channel Fabrics-Yesterday, Today and

Tomorrow". The other speakers were Dr. K Gopinath, Indian Institute of

Science, Bangalore who spoke on ‘Storage Virtualization’, and Dr. V Sridhar

of Satyam who spoke on ‘IP Storage’.

Laying stress on the fact the just running the network fast and increasing

the connectivity are not sufficient requirements, Malavalli said that the

explosion in the amount of data traffic and the number of users in today’s

data centers mandates additional stringent requirements support by SAN. Giving

an example, he said that every piece of text, every song, every movie, every

film, every image and every transaction is being stored, replicated, moved

around and backed up. In fact, ever day three million new web pages are

generated and the Internet traffic is around 350,000 terabytes per month. 2,000

petabytes of external storage are likely to be shipped in 2004. Left unchecked,

storage costs would quadruple over the next four years.

Looking at the future Malavalli said that 80 per cent of the world’s

external storage would be SAN - attached by 2001. SAN would get bigger and

global; Bandwidth on demand and storage on demand would follow. Storage would be

offered as services and data would be ubiquitous. He maintained that not only

are companies building SAN infrastructure today, but also adding intelligence to

it.

‘Trends in SAN’ is the first of a series of technology-oriented seminars

that Satyam would be organizing in the coming months.