Data storage blues a thing of the past

TECHNOLOGY: Firms develop methods to manage large data volumes.

Growth in the Indian banking, financial, telecom, IT and ITeS sectors is expanding the market for storage and backup exponentially.

According to a report of the International Data Corporation, India and China are expected to be the two main drivers of the 52 per cent increase in IT spending in the Asia Pacific region by 2010.

This is likely to have its effect on the number of installed enterprise hard disk drive storage devices, expected to quadruple from 2004 to 2010.

Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec India, says: "Data volumes are doubling every two years, while storage utilisation rates hover around 33 per cent. According to a study by CMP Media Research, data is needlessly duplicated by as much as 50-500 times. Consequently, space, power and cooling issues are growing in severity leading to growing data centre complexities in enterprises."

"Storage costs typically form 10-20 per cent of a company's total IT hardware expenditure. Although the price of storage is decreasing by approximately 25 per cent per annum, an average company's compounded annual growth rate for data is 55 per cent, which leaves an overall net increase in storage spending," Dhupar adds.

The traditional approach of just adding more disks and storage systems can satisfy the demand but the trouble is that there will be a proportional increase in requirement for power, cooling and space, which will eventually bump up against data centre limits.

To tackle these issues, data storage companies are gearing up to develop better technologies.

FlexVol, FlexClone, Snapshot and A-SIS De-duplication technologies have the ability to resolve such problems. Developed in-house by Network Appliance or NetApp, a pioneer in data centre solutions and a member of The Green Grid, the technologies have helped to save 40,000 kWh a month in its own data centre.

In addition, storage utilisation has been increased from less than 40 per cent to an average of 60 per cent by using FlexVol technology. Traditionally, storage utilisation rates range between 25 and 40 per cent, this means 60-75 per cent goes unused.

Vikram Shah, president, India operations, NetApp, says: "The idea behind these technologies is to use less disks by increasing storage utilisation."

Almost 70 per cent of data in organisations consist of duplicate copies, which consume vast amounts of storage. In this case, NetApp A-SIS De-duplication comes handy, as it helps to eliminate redundant data copies.

So far, these technologies have been implemented by Oracle, Blackboard, Consol Energy, Siemens Switzerland, Accenture, Ciba, Boston University and Fuji Film.