| Cost
of storage solutions
It's difficult to provide estimates of network
storage solutions because it depends on various
factors like size, scalability, company locations,
and growth. The factors will also vary between
different companies and industry verticals.
M. Ganesh, Country Executive, ESG, at IBM India
says, "Enterprises should evaluate storage
needs on criteria like organizational objectives,
current storage
infrastructure, and the ways in which the solution
can provide value to the organization.
 It's
important to realize that price alone should not
determine the buying decision. A solution should
be based on open standards to avoid getting tied
to asingle
vendor. Companies should ask for independent benchmarks
for assessing performance and service levels."
Sathyan Gopalan, National Manager, Storage Solutions
at Computer Associates says, "At an entry
level a company may want to migrate from a scenario
of individual tape devices on each server to a
centralized environment using a tape library and
automated backup software.
Depending on the scale of the environment, which
depends on factors like the capacity of servers,
need for online database backups, and size of
data, the investment budget can be between Rs
20 Lakhs to 40 Lakhs. NAS and SAN installations
could cost much more."
Binod Kumar Panda, Country Manager of Apara Enterprise
Solutions gives indicative pricing for a 500 GB
storage sub-system. "The price of a low-end
NAS disk subsystem starts at around Rs 7 Lakhs.
Backup software and Tape Libraries will cost between
Rs 8 and 11 lakhs. So an average solution will
cost between Rs 15 and 19 Lakhs. Now if you need
to replicate the data it will cost almost 1.6
times or double that of the primary set-up (disk
sub-system). For higher capacities the prices
will go up accordingly," says Panda.
SSP - My place or yours
A SSP (Storage Service Provider) can be a third
party who manages the storage facilities for an
enterprise. The storage devices can be on the
customer's premises or at the SSP's site connected
to the customer's machines through high bandwidth
links. SSPs provide customers an alternative to
buying their own computing infrastructure and
managing it themselves. Most SSPs offer capacity
in huge RAID farms and primarily target enterprises
with big, mainly Internet-related, storage needs.
Nikhil Madan, Country Manager, Legato Systems
India says, "The SSP has the responsibility
to manage and protect your data. It can provide
you a solution which will scale along with enterprise
growth. Enterprises can benefit from the reduction
in TCO of storage infrastructure that an SSP will
allow." It's a big opportunity for existing
data centers to embrace a SSP model since most
of the required technical infrastructure is already
in place.
The SSP market is now one of the most analyzed
segments in the storage industry. According to
IDC, worldwide spending in this market will increase
at a staggering CAGR (Compound Annual
Growth Rate) of 134 percent, from $153 million
in 2000 to $10.7 billion in 2005. Despite this
growth, IDC warns players in this space must use
caution to avoid pitfalls.
Doug Chandler, Manager for IDC's Storage and Data
Management Services program says, "SSPs must
demonstrate their viability to potential and current
investors and concentrate on market validation.
It will be critical to the market that the SSP
model becomes more widely accepted by
paying customers, regardless of
which SSPs become market leaders."
IDC believes that the SSP market is in a state
of flux, buffeted by shifts in customer wants
and needs, investor tendencies, technology supplier
strategies, new and untested technologies, and
the continuing primacy of the Internet in driving
industry development.
"The
success of the SSP market will be closely tied
to the success of the Internet Data Center, Web
hosting, and other firms that, as partners, will
drive much of the storage-on-demand business in
the next 12 to 24 months," Chandler said.
Aside
from economic issues, IDC believes other pitfalls
confront SSP players. Data sensitivity is one
of
them. "Customers want to outsource many of
the
mundane details of storage strategy, implementation,
and management, yet they don't want to turn over
their data. This paradoxical
behavior could hamper many SSPs," Chandler
said.
To this extent, IDC believes SSPs must offer undeniably
clear advantage regarding efficiency, performance,
availability, security, cost savings and time
to market.
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For
example, when many OSs had a file system that could deal only
with a maximum device size of 2 GB, the volume manager would
enable a 10 GB disk to appear as five 2 GB logical disks,
and therefore make the disk usable. The second wave of storage
virtualization occurred in the disk array itself. Large arrays
utilized internal virtualization to make the array usable
among multiple hosts. This was necessary because volume managers
work well for single hosts, but not when there is more than
one attached to a single device.