According to Storage Virtualization players,
Storage Virtualization is one of the most exciting technologies today and has a
very bright future in the offing.
Albeit,
at this point of time, the technology is actively being considered by most
enterprise customers but it will continue to impress in future also.
Storage
is strictly speaking a horizontal solution and equally relevant across all
verticals. The verticals that are the biggest consumers of storage are Telecom,
BFSI, IT/ITES, Media and Government.
Off
lately, almost all the companies are looking to consolidate their existing IT
infrastructure system and are constantly implementing new technologies to build
a dynamic IT infrastructure. Storage Virtualization is one of such latest
technologies which are being adopted extensively by the organizations these
days to build an IT infrastructure which is dynamic in nature.
Storage
Virtualization virtualizes small mass of storage from a relatively bigger and
multiple storage systems and in turn enables the tasks of archiving, backup and
recovery more efficiently with minimized time.
We at
ITVAR NEWS spoke to some of the vendors to get an insight of current status and
the future of Storage Virtualization market.
Storage Virtualisation technology starting to
gain foothold
Subroto
Das, Vice President-Storage Business- IBM India & South Asia, said,
“Organizations are facing problems of under-utilization of their storage
resources. Storage Virtualization
solutions allows organization to achieve greater storage utilization.
Companies
can reduce costs associated with support and maintenance via virtualization.
Further, its scalable design allows adding new devices based on organizations'
requirements. India has been one of the first and one of the leading countries
to adopt virtualization.
We
recommend the use of Virtualization technologies in storage across the entire
space of our engagement and product offerings i.e. enterprise, midrange and
entry level storage”. Moving further and informing about the Company’s current
focal points in Storage Virtualization offerings, he commented, “We recommend
the use of Virtualization technologies in storage across the entire space of
our engagement and product offerings i.e. enterprise, midrange and entry level
storage.
The
focus at this point is on the midrange via the Storwize V7000 Unified storage
box which is a virtualized storage device that provides enterprise class
functionality at midrange price points”. Commenting further about the verticals
that Company plans to target with their offerings, ITVAR NEWS was informed that
IBM has a range of offerings best suited for various verticals.
We
target Telecommunications, Banking, BFSI, IT, ITES, Retail, Government, Media
and Entertainment, Insurance and Healthcare industries to name a few. Lastly,
on being asked about the new/emerging technologies they expect to see in
Storage Virtualization in the next 3-5 years, he said, “Storage virtualization
is fairly new concept, more so among Indian enterprises.
Organizations
are only now beginning to understand its impact through early adopters. It is
early days for us to get deep into the variations that one could expect to see
within this technology. However, there is definitely a huge interest an immense
potential. Our philosophy in all that we offer in this area would be
customer-centric. IBM storage systems are aligned with customers’ business
goals and lead directly to positive outcomes.
Storage virtualization will be the urgent
need of the future
Bobby
Mon, Head, Enterprise Business, SMB, Dell India, gave ITVAR NEWS an insight
about the current status and the future of Storage Virtualization market.
Regarding this, he said, “Storage virtualization will be the urgent need of the
future.
The
technology is emerging fast onto the enterprise scene for good reasons. In many
cases, it can reduce the management burdens associated with storage; and offer
better models for datacenter migrations, back up and disaster recovery.
As
consumer requirements are increasing, more applications are coming into play
because of which, managing everyday storage needs is getting more and more
complex. Here is where storage virtualization will come into play.
Organizations
are inadvertently duplicating their data almost all the time. Different
departments are looking at one huge chunk of data and are using it to fulfill
their respective needs but are also creating, multiplying and reproducing
several copies of the same data.
Moreover,
for regulatory compliance, archiving data is critical, which means maintaining
copies of data. Hence, storage requirements are increasing exponentially. This
makes a strong case for technologies like storage virtualization”.
Informing
further about the verticals targeted by the Company, he said, “Verticals like
BFSI are aggressively expanding their core banking solutions, and added and
connected new branches, thus creating a second storage buying wave. Pure play
storage-only vendors garnered good client wins here.
Shifting
of application functions into storage systems and making them
"application-aware" emerged as one of the biggest opportunities, as
well as a challenge, for the storage industry in the next several years.
Customers increasingly demanded storage solutions rather than just storage
hardware.
Tiered
storage became a widely accepted concept and gained further acceptance by
virtue of its ability to lower the capital costs of storage infrastructure and
the ongoing operational costs”.
Talking
further about the way company looks at the Storage Virtualization segment in
India as well as on a global front, he commented, “The application of
virtualization technologies is having a dramatic effect on how today’s
computing infrastructures are deployed and managed.
By
abstracting software environments, application workloads, and data structures
from the underlying physical hardware, organizations are reducing costs,
increasing their IT flexibility and agility, and gaining productivity through
simplification. Consolidated storage is a key requirement of virtual
infrastructures, making it a core consideration when designing the virtual data
center for today and for the future. Rigid, complex storage solutions can
undermine the benefits organizations are trying to achieve, deterring
operational simplicity, efficient resource utilization, and enhanced service levels.
Dell
Compellent’s Storage Virtualization is the perfect complement to any leading
virtual server platform. Aggregating physical disks into logical virtual
volumes removes the limitations inherent to physical drives. The result is a
dynamic pool of storage resources shared by virtual machines (VMs). Storage is
presented to VMs simply as capacity, regardless of disk type, RAID level or
server connectivity”.
Lastly,
mentioning about the new/emerging technologies Dell expect to see in Storage
Virtualization in the next 3-5 years, he said, “Today, storage virtualization
is often aligned with product implementation (e.g. software on an appliance or
switch or in a storage system) used primarily for aggregation of heterogeneous
storage. Legacy storage technologies also prevent IT organizations from
realizing the full benefits of true virtualization - including business agility
and responsiveness to rapidly changing needs, nonstop availability of critical
services, improved application performance, UNIFIED Storage that supports file
as well as block level virtualization on a single appliance and optimized
utilization of infrastructure investments”.
“To
meet these challenges and reap these benefits, organizations need a
next-generation intelligent storage platform that is designed from the ground
up to address the needs of today's highly dynamic and highly virtualized data
centers. We are seeing lot of investment going in next few years to improve
these capabilities on storage virtualization. Seamless integration with
application awareness on Storage solution is another future trend”, he added.
Customers have started deploying
virtualization in their datacenters
The
views of Surajit Sen, Director Channels Marketing & Alliances, NetApp India
were no different from the views of Subroto Das and Bobby Mon.
Elucidating
about the current status and the future of Storage Virtualization market, said,
“After toying with the idea of virtualization over the last couple of years,
customers have started deploying virtualization in their datacenters. NetApp is
working on projections given by IDC that Globally Cloud Services was around
US$17.4B and will grow with CAGR of 26% till 2014. We substantiate similar
growth in India based on our experience in Indian IT market.
According
to credible reports in the public domain, storage virtualization as a
technology has not quite picked up as much as server virtualization and if industry estimates are anything to go by
then only about 5% of enterprises have gone in for virtualizing their storage.
Since
the industry sought to virtualize in silos and since server optimization has
long been the top priority for Indian IT heads, storage as well as network to
some extent did suffer initially. However, the correlation between server and
storage virtualization has been established and there is a general consensus
now that the time for storage virtualization has arrived.
According
to our assessment, we believe storage virtualization in the industry could have
gone up to close to 20% in the last 12 months alone and the trend is on an
upswing”. Mentioning about the verticals
NetApp is targeting with their offerings, he mentioned, “NetApp has been
successful across all Industry Verticals like Banking, IT/ ITeS, Insurance,
Telecom, Financial Services, Manufacturing and Government.
We are
looking forward to expand our horizons in Healthcare, Media and Entertainment
sectors”. Moving further and informing about how the company looks at the
Storage Virtualization segment in India as well as globally, he commented,
“Although storage virtualization has not really seen rapid growth in India, the
technology has definitely seen a slow and steady rise.
It's
interesting to note at this point that there are many misconceptions in India
when it comes to storage virtualization. It’s essential to address these issues
in order to arrive at the right storage virtualization solution for your
requirements.
There
are four basic types of storage virtualization- In-band, out-of-band,
split-path and array controller based storage virtualization approaches. The
choice of technology ultimately boils down to the best fit for the customer’s
requirements and budgets. NetApp has seen significant success with its V Series
Virtualization engine over the last 2 years”.
On
being asked about the kind of new/emerging technologies they expect to see in
Storage Virtualization in the next 3-5 years, he answered, “The industry is
moving towards a ‘Shared Infrastructure’ environment in the Datacenters. This
essentially means that Datacenters would break down the application centric
silos, which have traditionally created dedicated servers, networks &
storage silos for each application. Instead customers would create virtualized
pools of compute, network & storage resources”.
These
resources can by dynamically provisioned based on the demands posed by various
application workloads. In this context storage would need to depend on
innovations like
- Scale Up & Scale Out
- Storage Efficiency
- Intelligent caching
- Unified Architecture
- Integrated Data Protection
- Non-stop Operations
- Secure Multi-tenancy
- Service Automation & Analytics
Conclusion
Going
by the verdicts of the above vendors, it could be easily summed up that the
market for Storage Virtualization management solutions is expected to become
one of the most innovative and potentially lucrative in the near future.
Jalaj
Roy Choudhury
itvarnews.netBusiness & Investment Opportunities
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