The Hindu : Business : Storage meet: `Turn data into intelligence'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 18, 2005

Business

Business

Storage meet: `Turn data into intelligence'

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE FEB. 17. "Data storage is not just a warehousing issue; it's about business intelligence and business continuity,'' feels Arun Bhagat, Acer India's General Manager Resource Management. While intelligence ensures the secrecy of critical data, continuity protects against disastrous loss to natural calamity or malign human activity. Mr Bhagat was setting out the theme of the National Conference on Storage Consolidation, organised here today, by the Manufacturers' Association of Information Technology (MAIT).

In his keynote, V. Vivekanand, sales director, Asia Pacific, for Hitachi Data Systems, quoted studies of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) which found that over half of all open system data is unnecessary, about two thirds has not been accessed during the last three months and over one-fifth is a duplication of something already available in the organisation. The solution, he said, was Storage Area Management (SAM) - the latest industry buzzword, which aimed at managing heterogenous storage hardware, servers and networks by thinking of it as one single "virtual'' entity.

`Don't bite the bait!'

His advice to new customers: when storage providers offered solutions that were in fact `proprietary bait' — don't bite! Why? Because this was now the era of open systems and standards, Mr. Vivekanand said.

According to R. Sadashiva, Business Manager of Hewlett Packard's StorageWorks division, the key storage trends in 2005 would be:

(a). Magnetic disk will remain the primary mode of storage, thanks to its lower cost per gigabyte and higher density.

(b). But don't write off tape which will evolve primarily into an archiving medium.

(c). Disk-to-disk backup will replace tape for applications where fast recovery rather than long term protection is required.

(d). SATA — the serial version of the Advanced Technology Attachement(ATA) interface standard for disk drives — is getting faster everyday: Transfer speeds of 300 megabits per second are expected this year and this may be the standard for tomorrow's drives, along with the iSCSI or Internet protocol-based Small Computer Systems Interface.

Other key inputs in the one day event came from Richard Johns of Acer- Australia (Data recovery); H. Ramapriya of Wipro Technologies (Storage Consolidation); Jim Simon of Quantum Corporation (Disk back-up and store); Aditya Menon of MPhasis (Regulatory issues) and B. Chandrasekhar and Udi Paret, both of Intransa Inc. ( IP based storage area networks).

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