'Enterprises Need To Re-Architect Their Storage Environments'

The storage market is growing at a phenomenal rate. It is also seeing a transition in terms of technology. Biztech2 spoke to Oussama El-Hilali, senior director, Engineering, Symantec, about some of the new trends to watch out for in the storage arena.

Could you tell us the current state of the storage market?

One of the factors that fuel the interest in storage is the exponential growth that has been happening in terms of data. The market currently stands at $11 billion market and is projected to reach $14 billion by 2012 (Gartner).

Exponential growth of this kind creates problems when it comes to management. When we talk about storage, one has to talk about volume management and replication, which gives the user the ability to interact with data, be it primary, secondary or a mirror copy.

In this area, what we’re observing among our customers is that their existing architecture is outdated and one of the major elements in the change that is taking place in the storage industry is a progression from tape-based storage to disk-based one.

You mentioned that existing storage architectures are outdated. Please explain.

From a storage management perspective, CIOs now need to look at storage management tools and data protection. In enterprises today, there is a transformation taking place from tape libraries to disk ones and we’re seeing very high adoption of VTL professional tape libraries, which offer a simple solution in terms of infrastructural change.

At Symantec, we believe that disk transformation from tape to virtual tape is just the first step towards the bigger picture. The bigger transformation will happen when people are interacting directly with disk and you have backup being done from primary data to disk, secondary data to disk and so on.

One of the other interesting aspects of storage today is the price that it is available at. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. Another factor that a lot of people are paying attention to is energy consumption. Everyone’s trying to minimise it. So what’s happening is the trend is shifting towards investing in storage that consumes less power and requires less amount of cooling.

What kind of an effect is the market flux having in the storage arena?

The economy is forcing many businesses to merge and this creates the need to bring large data centres together, and it’s a big opportunity to re-architect your environment. So one of the key elements is when you have enterprises that are on the verge of merging, they may not be able to take that step due to uncertainty, and maybe see fit to wait for better technology and that’s where Symantec comes in. We have a SAAS offering that allows people to back up their data on the cloud, while their enterprises are involved in re-architecting of the environment.

That is an interesting strategy, however, since everything is shifting to the cloud, isn’t there a security risk involved?

Absolutely. While SAAS offers some wonderful opportunities, it still has its defects. I think that’s where we have the advantage of being Symantec, where as a corporation we understand security, and the need for standards and protecting data.

One of the key elements in this scenario is encryption. In an environment such as this, having the data encrypted and decrypted, while it moves in and out of a certain point in the cloud is the key element.

Another aspect of securing users’ data comes up when you have many users using the cloud to store their data. In this scenario, the key lies in making sure that you put in place mechanisms that allow data to be easily separable, so as to avoid data mix-ups.

Could you talk about Symantec’s role in the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning space?

In this market, we offer a number of solutions depending on the type of disaster. So we’ve had customers, who have experienced rather unfortunate kinds of disasters coming to us. And quite often you find large enterprises have DR plans that recreate entire physical facilities and refurbish them; DR is an important aspect of that and that’s where we step in.

Let us consider an example, say disaster A is physical, we have tools within NetBackup that allow us to recreate a machine from scratch. The speed of recovery is very important and for enterprises we offer an array of recovery tools. Tools such as these, allow you to move millions of very small files, such as mailbox data that some companies maintain, using snapshots. Flash Backup allows you to backup using snapshots that are at times much quicker than traditional backup.

Going forward, can you highlight some trends in the storage space?

SaaS is definitely one of the top trends today. With the current condition of the economy, more people are hesitant to re-architect their environments. The other thing that’s happening recently is that bandwidth is getting cheaper by the day. You are soon going to see higher amount of bandwidth at lower cost and I think that’ll make the SaaS proposition even more valuable.