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Express Computer, 16 March, 2009
The need to optimize storage and cut costs resulted in the adoption of technologies such as automation, VTL and D2D backup. The government, telecom and insurance verticals drove the market says Akhtar Pasha
Despite the meltdown in global markets, storage remains as a striking example of what is possible when innovation is given full reign. Demand for secondary storage products continued to be strong in 2008. Yet on the other, within most data centers, storage has historically focused more on effectiveness than efficiency. Today, however, customers have changed their focus towards optimizing storage infrastructure and reducing cost and this has led to the success of tape libraries, VTL and disk-to-disk-tape in 2008.
The government, telecom, banking, insurance and manufacturing did most of the spending on secondary storage. While there is no estimate available on the growth of this segment, looking at the deal size and spending by the above verticals, we can safely conclude that it should have grown in double digits in 2008 over 2007.
Continued evolution: LTO-4 dominates
 The tape storage market continued to evolve. We believe that the economics of enterprise-class tape drives are well suited for deep archival and tiered storage. Furthermore, we expect that tape technologies deployed exclusively in large-scale libraries and tape subsystems will be a conduit for SAN deployments along with tape and server virtualization exercises.
Looking at the deals and the traction the tape market saw in 2008, we strongly believe tape data storage will remain viable for backup, archival, and data protection applications even with the advent of disk-based backup solutions. The economics of tape improve significantly when tape technologies are deployed in multidrive tape libraries that are capable of holding several hundred or more tape cartridges. Additionally, we expect that tape will remain an integral component of a customer's storage infrastructure, especially when coupled with compliance applications with encryption capabilities. Tape drives with native encryption offer increased security for customers who want to use tape for long-term retention.
Applications drive the market
Applications ask for more from enterprise tape technology than raw, uncompressed capacity. The fourth generation of LTO tape drives is capable of storing 800 MB on a single tape cartridge and has grown to be a pervasive and widely adopted tape technology, especially in tape automation, tape libraries designed for backup, archive, and data protection needs. In fact, the published LTO tape drive road map defines next generation products that will double in capacity every two to three years, similar to the enterprise tape drives.
Niraj Mandal, Country Manager - India, Tandberg Data (Asia) Pte Ltd., said, "While the Q4 2008 saw business being badly hit, most business for secondary story [RDX Quick Store] has come from the government and was SI driven [by Wipro and HCL]. NIC, Indian Air Force, LIC, BSNL and DoT were a few of our customers. Large customers are increasingly buying LTO-based tape automation library solutions mostly driven by mandatory compliance requirements. The RBI has made it mandatory to keep any transactional and customer data for audit for seven years. Keeping data on disc for seven years will be a costly proposition. We have been successful in selling to Kingfisher Airlines, Patni Computers and WNS." Additional business drivers for tape automation products have been DR the reason being to retrieve data faster.
Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP StorageWorks Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India Sales, said, "The sales of tape libraries and tape automation products were driven by government and large projects.
We saw traction for ESL tape libraries based on LTO-4 technology in large data centers. In the mid-range, there was interest in EML modular libraries from the manufacturing vertical." Additionally customers are recognizing the need and asking questions on key management. Since 60-70% of tape library customers go in for tape encryption, they are asking how they can manage the keys. At the entry-level, customers are demanding MSL autoloaders and are replicating with SAN as the backend online storage and MSL for data protection.
Enter Virtual Tape Libraries
Praveen Sahai, Head-Strategy, Marketing and Corporate Affairs, EMC Data Storage Systems India, said, "One of key concerns for today's enterprise customers is this—back up more data, more often, in less time, with the same budget. To address this problem, customers are willing to invest in Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) and we have been successful in this space in 2008. Telecom and IT services firms bought these solutions. VTL are disk subsystems that use tape emulation to appear as physical tape libraries and tape drives to backup software."
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Neeraj Mediratta, Founder and CEO, Ace Data Devices, said, "While the new projects and new initiatives are put onto the backburner, there has been no compromising on the budgets and tape infrastructure for backup and recovery. We closed two big projects—Bharti and EXL Services that bought end-to-end storage solutions such as VTL, deduplication, Networker for backup and tape library. These two customers are leveraging VTL to shrink their large backup window. Additionally telcos are doing it to meet the compliance objective. The audit requirement is pushing them to have faster backup and shorter retrieval of archival data and hence investments in VTL will continue to remain high in 2009." |
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People often assume that enterprises are transitioning more of their backups to disk because they are frustrated with tape. Tape is slower than disk, it is prone to more errors and failures, and it is difficult to manage hundreds, and potentially thousands, of individual tape cartridges. The reality is that enterprises are not frustrated with tape. Many of its inherent challenges have been addressed through more intelligent automated tape library systems. They simply cannot backup all of their critical corporate data with tape alone because there is more data to backup than ever before, there is less planned downtime during which to complete backups, application owners want more frequent backups and faster restores and IT operations must improve backup and restore service with the existing budget. The paybacks are high.
VTL provides non-disruptive introduction of disk into existing backup operations. Because the VTL appears as physical tape libraries and tape drives to the backup software, IT can introduce the VTL with minimal disruption to existing backup jobs and schedules. Therefore, if a large enterprise has hundreds of backup jobs that an administrator configured to work with a particular tape library and a specified number of drives within that library, you do not have to modify all of those jobs to accommodate the VTL. If the backup jobs rely on 10 linear tape-open (LTO) drives, simply define 10 virtual LTO drives within the VTL. It maximizes your existing investment with physical tape.
While most large enterprises have a significant investment in tape, they are looking to introduce new technology that can help achieve better backup and restore performance. However, they still want to integrate tape. Many VTLs offer the ability to create physical tape directly from the VTL as well as the ability to increase tape media utilization through better compression and techniques such as tape stacking.
Surajit Sen, Director-Marketing & Alliances, NetApp, said, "In 2007, the VTL market was insignificant, but towards the closure of 2008 we saw this market buzzing. Two deals on VTL were important for us—HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company and a telco. We are finding plenty of opportunity in large insurance companies, oil & gas and media houses as well. The decision for investment in VLT is strategic as there is no need to procure large tape libraries and this has become relevant in large data centers where the real estate costs are at a premium and are further constrained by the rising cost of power and cooling."
The third element is still more compelling. VTL lowers the total cost of ownership of disk. Most vendors offer VTL with compression and deduplication. These techniques help improve disk capacity utilization and lower capital expenditures on disk. It will also help some enterprises store more data longer on disk before vaulting it on tape.
Sahai said EMC offers interoperability across a broad ecosystem as well as adds new features and functionality. It also benefits from the CLARiiON and Symmetrix DMX engineering. Because these storage platforms are underlying disk subsystems for the VTL, any advances in these platforms, whether it is in interfaces, interconnects, or drives, improve the scale and reliability of the VTL.
Sivasankaran L, Director Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd., said, "We are seeing growth for VTL along with deduplication. We have a telecom customer and retail customer who are using our StorageTek VTL Prime & Plus to reduce the backup window. Telecom, retail and banking have a large backup window and they want to shrink their backup windows to recover the data faster and for complying with regulations." Sun's VTL consists of Sun servers, Solaris, the Zettabyte File System (ZFS), and Sun storage. It helps maintain active-active clustering in the VTL and many resiliency features in the disk subsystem. Sun believes that the Solaris OS and ZFS will help it to increase scale and reliability through OS-level clustering and software RAID at an affordable price because the company will rely on software-based approaches.
HP too saw greater traction for its VTL products in 2008 than in 2007 mostly at the high-end of the market. Krishnamoorthy said, "We shipped about 18 units of high-end VTL (the 6000, 9000 and 12000 products)."
D2D backup to dominate
While tape will continue to play a role in large enterprise recovery and business continuity, businesses are steadily moving their backups to disk particularly verticals that have huge customer databases. Customers using disk-storage for backup and restoration are those where huge data stores need to be backed up or have critical production data that changes rapidly (hence the need to take continuous backups to ensure quick retrieval in case of loss of primary data). Customers have the multiple options to choose disks depending up the performance requirement by different applications. They can choose SATA for low performance but cheaper disk or use SAS for high performance storage backup archival and storage.
Subram Natarajan, Senior Solutions Architect-STG, IBM India / South Asia., said, "Tape cannot be replaced by disks for backup purposes as cost of per gigabyte is disproportionate high and hence tape will continue to co-exists along with tape despite the increasing. However, VTL will put pressure on tape libraries. The writing is on the wall."
Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President-Solutions, Products and Services-Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, said, "We look at the D2D backup from two perspectives. First, is to have integrated file and content services that can automatically move the data to another media and help in deduplication. Second aspect is to have an integrated search that can help in data discovery for compliance and governance purpose. It will help in mining the huge data warehouse. An ITES customer of ours is using disk for backup, as it is faster than tape drives. "We can vouch for D2D on VTL for optimizing the storage costs. You can replicate data using VTL making sure that no data moves out of the data center."
Given the most IT businesses were down from September 2008 onwards, the secondary storage market has sustained—CIOs are showing interest in buying new technology to tame storage costs. We expect a turnaround towards H2 2009.
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