The Hindu : Business : Data storage is like valet parking

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Business

Business

Data storage is like valet parking

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGLORE, MAY 24. First, there was direct storage: Tape drives and hard disks, attached to the computers which used them.

Then came networked storage: The bewildering alternatives of SAN, NAS — storage area networks and network-attached storage — which needed a pricey fabric of fibre optic cabling to bind it all together.

It is time to kiss these technologies goodbye says, Intransa, a California-based company whose Israeli, American, Chinese and Indian brains have put together what they called the `Third Wave of Storage': a `native' IP-SAN system that is a storage network, designed bottom-up to harness the Internet Protocol.

The `wave' is now lapping Indian shores: the company has formally launched full scale operations in this country this month — targeting the burgeoning small and medium sector whose transition from direct to networked storage has been inhibited by the high cost of fibre channels.

To them, Itransa which has tied up with a number of channel partners here including Ingram-Micro, offers to help leapfrog over the SAN-NAS era and land at the cutting edge, where `iSCSI rules' and the Internet provides a virtually free networking backbone.

In a detailed pre-launch briefing for The Hindu, Intransa President and CEO, Avishai Katz, explained that entry-level IP-SAN level systems could be as low as $20,000 equivalent. Customers were freed to deploy physical storage of their choice, while the `intelligent' controller did the rest. "This is the only controller in the world that takes a network-centric-view of storage,'' he added.

Intransa's Country Manager for India, B. Chandrasekhar, explained that the company had set up a software development centre in Pune — the only one outside the U.S. — where tomorrow's storage technologies were being brewed.

A sneak preview of what this is? "Think of future storage as valet parking,'' says Dr. Katz, "When I hand over my keys to the valet, I really do not want to know where my car is parked — only that it is safe and will be returned to me when I need it. Tomorrow's storage will be like that: You may have no idea where your information is stored — and you won't care — as long as you have exclusive use of it.''

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