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Storage without
Boundaries
A CNETAsia Article Series on Storage Trends,
Strategies and Technology Updates

Analyze this - Top predictions by industry analysts

Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus
Gartner and IDC
By Yeap Yin Ching, CNETAsia

Gartner: Storage management rules the day

Phil Sargeant is Gartner Asia Pacific's Research Director for the servers and storage
market. Prior to joining Gartner in 2000, he spent most of the previous 25 years working
for server and storage hardware vendors, including Hitachi Data Systems, EMC and
StorageTek. Today, he spends a good deal of time liaising with vendors and end-users
providing advice and guidance about the server and storage arena.

What is do you think will be the #1 storage trend in 2003?

Sargeant: The biggest storage trend over 12 months is storage management. Within storage
management, Gartner talks about three primary segments: Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage
Resource Management (SRM).

Our research shows that in 2001, the storage management market was US$4.9 billion. This is expected to
grow to US$15.2 billion by 2006.

While everything within these three segments is growing, there are two specific areas - replication and
virtualization - both within the Infrastructure segment which are growing significantly faster than the rest.

What will be the impact of this growth in replication and virtualization on the overall storage
management market?

Sargeant: As they are growing faster than the rest, they will take up increasingly more of the whole
storage management pie.

In 2001, replication was 23.7 percent of the storage management market, but this will grow to 38.3
percent by 2006. The storage virtualization segment is also growing substantially. It will grow from
US$200 million in 2001 to US$670 million 2006, moving from 3.8 percent market share to 4.4 percent over
the same period.

What would you say is the correct definition of storage virtualization?

Sargeant: There are many definitions of virtualization, but a high level description would be that
virtualization is layer that separates physical storage from the logical. The physical storage could reside
2

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Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus Gartner and IDC

anywhere within a company and be from any vendor, the storage virtualization layer provides a logical
view of all storage connected to it.

What are customers looking for today in storage management?

Sargeant: What users would like is to be able to buy storage from different vendors and manage them
seamlessly. This avoids their getting locked into one supplier and having to pay a premium for upgrades.
The main problem today is that they cannot manage their storage resources seamlessly. No vendor today
can honestly claim to provide total seamless management of its own and other vendors' products - at least
not at a very sophisticated level.

So, users today are still obliged to get disparate products using the best-of-breed approach and contend
with the many different interfaces. While they would love to be in a situation everything fits, they will
probably have to wait until 2004 or early 2005 for that.

What are the critical success factors for storage management to really take off in Asia?

Sargeant: The main factor will be the maturing of standards and interoperability between vendors.

The Storage Networking In (SNIA) has two initiatives on this - the Storage Management Initiative (SMI)
and Common Information Model (CIM). While the end objective is to produce standards that provide
interoperability between different vendors products, only elements of each have been defined today. It is a
slow and ongoing process that will take a few years to complete.

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Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus Gartner and IDC

However, things are definitely improving, as there is widespread vendor support for these standards. They
may not have the products yet, that may another six months to a year.

Which countries in Asia Pacific are the most advanced in terms of adopting storage management
solutions?

Sargeant: The more advanced countries are probably Korea, Australia and Singapore, followed by
Taiwan. Emerging countries like China, India, Vietnam and Indonesia still tend to be more hardware
centric and don't concentrate to same degree on the storage management aspects. The trend for Asian
companies is still to buy storage management products from their hardware supplier.

Who are the key players in this space?

Sargeant: Today, EMC is leading the replication segment, but the other vendors - like HP, IBM, Veritas -
are catching up with some of their own replication products.

In storage virtualization, Veritas was probably the most successful vendor in 2001, but once again, there
is a lot of competition coming up with new virtualization products.

IDC - Network storage finally takes off

Graham Penn is the Director of Storage Research for IDC Asia/Pacific. In this capacity he
directs and coordinates storage research in 12 countries around the Asia/Pacific region.
Prior to the current appointment he was General Manager Research at IDC Australia. He
has more than 38 years of experience in the IT industry as a programmer, end-user,
systems analyst and market analyst.

What is do you think will be the #1 storage trend in 2003?

Penn: Network storage will become mainstream in 2003, with some users extending their initial
implementations, other starting the journey.

Although it has been talked about across Asia for the last couple of years and there are some big
government and specific industry implementations, the number of network storage implementations -
whether it is SAN or NAS - has been quite low

There are a few reasons for this. For one, most organizations in Asia simply don't feel that they need it yet
although this could be because of a misunderstanding of the benefits of network storage. In other cases,
the organization is just too small to justify the investment. They may however need it in three to four years
time.

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Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus Gartner and IDC

What are the main benefits of network storage?

Penn: The main benefit is of course the reduction of TCO. Basically, they will be substituting upfront
investment in capital for savings in ongoing people costs. In a network storage environment, fewer people
will be required to do manual tasks, such as putting tapes into tape backup units. Once the storage
infrastructure is networked, a lot of tasks can be automated.

Storage networking and consolidation can also lead to higher storage usage, moving from 35-45 percent
range to the 60-70 percent range.

What is the most popular storage networking solution today?

Penn: There is no one easy solution for everyone. Every site is unique. Organizations need external help
and advice on how to implement network storage solutions as typically, they won't have the skills or time
to do it in-house. This creates opportunities for consulting or professionals services organizations. They
can guide them on what needs to be done today given their objectives, although this has to be on ongoing
process since no organization stands still and requirements will change.

It could be NetworkAttached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Networking (SAN) or both. For most, it will be
a combination. What we will start to see are products that provide both NAS and SAN in one solution,
transparently.

What is fuelling the growth of storage networking solutions?

Penn: The real catalyst is growth in data of all types. With data growing between 50-100 percent per
annum, depending on the organization, and it doesn't take very long before you are drowning in data.

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Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus Gartner and IDC

Traditional management methods will not work. With limited dollars and headcount, you can't continue to
do what you have been doing. The obvious way is network storage.

Which countries and industries are ahead in adopting storage networking?

Penn: In general, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand are most advanced in terms of network storage
with a 15-20 percent adoption rate. There are industry exceptions in each country. For example, the
adoption rate for banks and telecommunications companies is usually way over the country average,
while manufacturing will be under it.

In developing markets, the incidents of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) are very much higher. The first step
is to move away from DAS as you can't generate benefits of network storage until you do so. We will get
there but it is going to take time, some more than others.

There is a general perception that the storage services required to implement storage networking
from the usual vendors is just too expensive for most SMEs in Asia Pacific. Is there a solution?

Penn: There is a growing group of storage integrators developing specific storage services capabilities.
They typically start off with six to eight people with a specific range of skills, and grow to about 15 in size.
In some countries, they are starting to form federations of small storage integrators working together.

These storage integrators do a combination of work, owning some clients but also providing subcontract
services for major vendors. SMEs will form relationships with these small contractors as they can buy
services when they need them.

This is happening a lot in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia today. It will probably spread to countries
like China and India where huge geographies will create the demand for local service support in multiple
cities.

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Analyze this - Top predictions by industry gurus Gartner and IDC