Storage Special

A 9.9 Media Publication

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February | 21 | 2010 | Rs.50Volume 05 | Issue 13

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Technology for Growth and Governance

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EDITORIALRAHUL NEEL MANI | [email protected]

1thectoforum.com 21 FEBRUARY 2010CTO FORUM

Use Storage Smartly: CIOs must be

involved in business planning to create smart storage

architectures for the future

The days of blindly adding disk space to meet the

increasing demand for criti-cal business data are over. The new order requires CIOs to first consider the full storage environment including data availability, resource utilisation, data security, disaster recovery, environmental concerns and then plan their architecture. To do this effectively, CIOs must understand the business needs behind requests for stor-age. IT teams need to collabo-

systems are used smartly; and therefore IT teams need to be involved in the classification process.

Apart from technology-related issues, environmental and regulatory factors must be kept in mind while architecting the storage infrastructure for the enterprises of the future. This is a significant shift from the past and CIOs need to assess and design their storage systems vis-a-vis the evolving environmen-tal and legal framework.

How are CIOs coping? While there are several different approaches, the answer often lies in a blend of smarter tech-nologies and better strategic planning.

In this year’s Storage Special, we analyse the most popu-lar enterprise storage trends together with an assessment of their acceptability and adop-

rate with business users and identify what they need to store, archive and retrieve. Where should a CIO begin? The first step is to determine the value of the data that is necessary for making informed business decisions. In my view, only primary data needs to be ‘data in motion’; the rest can reside on inexpensive storage devices or just be discarded.

This analysis cannot be done using tools. Human expertise is critical to ensure that storage

tion amongst enterprises. Our research and analysis suggests that CIOs who are in sync with the business needs of their enterprise are the ones who manage to use storage efficient-ly. Their solutions enable the enterprise to grow quicker, stay nimble, and do more with less.

We are committed to high-lighting best practices amongst industry leaders and hope that you will find value in the fea-tures and our cover story. As always, I look forward to your feedback.

EDITOR’S PICK23 What About the Elephant

in the Room?Robert Presley, former IT Director, GameStop says he loves virtualisation but CIOs have lost their way and are now putting a band-aid on the real problem.

2 21 FEBRUARY 2010 thectoforum.comCTOFORUM

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18 | Make It Small CIOs want storage to occupy less space in the data centre and take less time to manage. New developments in storage technology are making that possible.

COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o K.P.T House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. TTC Ind. Area, Plot No. A-403, MIDC Mahape, Navi Mumbai 400709

COLUMN43 | NO HOLDS BARRED:RESEARCH IN ACTIONRuss Owen, President of CSC Man-aged Services Portfolio shares his company's vision on innovation.BY SANA KHAN

48 | VIEW POINT: AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-INTo avoid any service related issues, it is essential for customers to deal carefully with their software vendors.BY BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI

FEATURES39 | BY INVITATION: FUTURE OF STOR-AGE INDUSTRY: Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to worry CIOs.

CO NTE NT S THECTOFORUM.COM

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FEBRUARY10

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

12 |Stop Walking in the Dark “CIOs need to adopt a proactive approach to Information Technology management," says Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software

VOLUME 05 | ISSUE 13 | 21 FEBRUARY 2010

Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh

Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur

EDITORIALEditor: Rahul Neel Mani

Resident Editor (West & South): Ashwani MishraSr. Assistant Editor: Gyana Ranjan Swain

Assistant Editor: Aditya KelekarConsulting Editor: Shubhendu Parth

Principal Correspondent: Vinita GuptaCorrespondent: Sana Khan

DESIGNSr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan

Art Director: Binesh Sreedharan Associate Art Director: Anil VK

Manager Design: Chander Shekhar Sr. Visualisers: PC Anoop, Santosh Kushwaha

Sr. Designers: Prasanth TR & Anil T Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

ADVISORY PANELAjay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limired

Anil Garg, CIO, DaburDavid Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy

Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej IndustriesManish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo

India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCoRaghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India

S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFLSantrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group

Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices

Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank

Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay

Vijay Mehra, Executive VP, Global Head-Industry Verticals, Patni

SALES & MARKETINGVP Sales & Marketing: Naveen Chand SinghNational Manager Online Sales: Nitin Walia

National Manager-Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (09880436623)Product Manager – Rachit Kinger

Asst. Brand Manager: Arpita GanguliCo-ordinator-MIS & Scheduling: Aatish Mohite

Bangalore & Chennai: Vinodh K (09740714817)Delhi: Pranav Saran (09312685289)

Kolkata: Jayanta Bhattacharya (09331829284)Mumbai: Sachin Mhashilkar (09920348755)

PRODUCTION & LOGISTICSSr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath

Production Executive: Vilas MhatreLogistics: MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari,

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15 | NEXT HORIZONS: THE ART OF THE DEAL Lessons in suc-cessful vendor negotia-tions.

REGULARS

01 | EDITORIAL06 | ENTERPRISE

ROUNDUP42 | BOOK

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46 | LITTLE GIANTS: IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT How an effective fleet management system helped Carzonrent in reducing their turn-around time.

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15 46

LETTERS

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how

to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.

Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to [email protected]

PULL UP YOUR SOCKS

The ever increasing demand for storage appears to be outpacing

the ever reducing cost of storage at an alarming rate. While this

is good for storage suppliers, it is a daunting task for the enter-

prise IT leaders to pull together strategies that take advantage of

data de-duplication, data management, virtualisation and every

other trick in the book to ensure that storage demands can be

effectively managed.

DAVID BRISKMAN, CIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories

IT TRANSFORMATION

I was delighted to receive the Feb 07 issue of CTO Forum. It not

only clarified a lot of issues on IT transformation process but also

showed the way to go. I would like to share my personal experi-

ences with my peers in the industry. The Calendar with the issue

was a refreshing change. Keep up the good work.

K.VASANTHA KUMAR, IT Head, Linea Fashions India

Private Limited

“The new CTO Forum with its refresh-ing design and layout and coverage of contemporary issues is extremly sat-isfactory. I read the magazine regularly and will look forward to contribute in the future.”AJAY DHIR, Group CIO, JSL Limited.

CTOForum LinkedIn GroupJoin more than 200 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn

group for latest news and hot enterprise technology

discussions. Share your thoughts, participate in

discussions and win prizes for the most valuable

contribution. You can join The CTOForum group at:

www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2580450

Some of the hot discussions on the group are:Will the IT Amendment Act that requires

corporates to protect personal information

on computers have an impact on enterprises'

security practices?

The passage of amendments to the IT Act 2000, which

came into effect from October, 2009 has made substantial

difference in the requirements from Indian industry. First,

the cyber law and its amendments need to be carefully

studied and understood by corporate personnel in-charge

of compliance. Secondly, there are more steps to follow-

up. The Indian Cyber Laws are in the right direction.

—Malick Mohamed, Centre Manager at Ikas Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Which role will die - the CIO or the CTO?

"I would say both will co-exist. This is purely based on the organisational needs and business

model. Example: If the organisation is headed towards automation and prioritise internal

needs, that might give birth to the role of a CIO if it does not exist. If the organisation is headed towards external focus and product delivery, the

CTO role will be crucial."—Raj DN, Head of Database Operations, Sify

Technologies Ltd.

CTOF Connect Govind Rammurthy, MD and CEO, eScan says banks in India need to instill confidence amongst users when it comes to online banking. He talks to Ashwani Mishra on the areas of concern in the online banking space and other emerging security threats. Excerpts from the interview. To read the full story go to:

thectoforum.com/content/stop-ignoring-basic-norms

BEYOND THE BASICSA CIO has to make an impact and deliver significant value to business.“I believe that just speaking the right language or applying known formulae is not enough to get the CIO home. As a CIO, we have to get around to some basics.” To read the full story go to:

thectoforum.com/resources/opinions

OPINION

S.R. BALA, Exec VP ITGodfrey Philips.



Enterprise

ROUND-UP

STORY INSIDE

Sify, in partnership with HDS, has

launched on-demand storage services Pg 9

billionForecasted market for vir-tualisation and related ser-vices in 2010: Springboard Research

Encouraging Signs of a Turnaround in Storage Systems Market. iSCSI SAN market shows promising growth.WORLDWIDE external disk storage systems factory revenues posted a 10.0% decline year over year, total-ling $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Stor-age Systems Tracker. Total disk storage systems capac-ity shipped reached 2,661 petabytes, growing 21% year over year.

EMC maintained its lead in the market with 24.2% revenue share in the third quarter, followed by IBM with 13.2% share. HP ended in the third position with 11.8% market share. Network Disk Storage Sys-tems: The total network disk storage market (NAS

Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) declined 7.6% year over year in the Q3 to $3.4 billion in revenues.

Open SAN market which declined 16%, EMC maintained its lead with 24.4% share. The NAS mar-ket grew 2.2% YOY, led by EMC with 46.4% revenue share and followed by NetApp with 24.5% share. The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momen-tum, posting 24.7% revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 33.6% revenue share, followed by EMC with 15.1%. Source: IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly

Tracker, December 3, 2009.

$1.35DATA BRIEFING

E N T E R PR I S E RO U N D - U P


Scale-out NAS (Network Attached Stor-age) not only meets rich media perfor-mance requirements, it does so cost ef-fectively. It reduces power consumption relative to scale-up systems since proces-sors typically use 95% less power than that consumed by an additional disk shelf.

QUICK BYTE ON SCALE-OUT NAS

IBM Unveils Clustered NAS Storage. SONAS products can scale in both capacity and performance.IBM has announced its entry in the growing market for clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

IBM said its new ‘Scale Out Network Attached Storage’ (SONAS) products can scale both capacity and performance while providing parallel access to data and a global name space that can manage billions of files and up to 14.4 petabytes of capacity.

The new offering is a hardware-based expansion of its ‘Scale Out File Services’ and is based on the General Parallel File System (GPFS). The Samba-based sys-tems include management nodes, switches, interface nodes, data storage nodes, RAID controllers and expansion units, and offer snapshot capabilities, tiered stor-age and HSM through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

The NAS systems include Gigabit Ethernet, 10Gigabit Ethernet and 20Gbps InfiniBand connections, and users can combine up to 30 interface nodes and 30 240-drive storage pods to reach 7.2PB with 1TB drives and 14.4PB with 2TB drives, which will be coming in April, a month after general availability.

IBM is currently testing applications with SONAS, including Symantec and IBM Tivoli backup, VMware ESX and Oracle RAC.

THEY SAID IT

STEVE DUPLESSIE

There is a lot of buzz about cloud computing. It is tipped as the new wave in computing which will ulti-mately replace the private IT infrastructure and mam-moth data centres that enterprises today put together. But Steve Duplessie, Founder of Enterprise Strategy Group and the guru of storage and enterprise systems thinks otherwise. This is what he says about cloud:

“The ‘Cloud’ market is not a market – it’s a construct. The SSP market 10 years ago wasn’t a market either – it was a bad idea. Both had absurd levels of ‘buzz’ which led to absurd levels of VC money being poured in. Both will end the same way – with disillusionment.”—Steve Duplessie

will end the same way – with disillusionment.”—Steve Duplessie

E NT E R PR I S E RO U N D - U P


Power Efficiency Cooling Efficiency

60.8%

51.4%

Multi-tiered data centres are cost effective. Traditional approach of building data centres is unsustainable and increases capitals costs.RICHARD EINHORN, Director, Business Devel-opment and Strategy at HP spoke to Vinita Gupta about data centre trends in 2010 and what HP has to offer in this space. Excerpts:

Could you cite an example of a company where HP has helped transform the data centre experience?HP has helped many companies globally in transforming their data centre experience. A recent example is Citibank. We delivered a cost-effective, well-engineered data centre

that meets the highest criteria of environ-mental sustainability. In just four years, Citibank reduced its data centre footprint globally from 52 to 24.

Besides this, we did a few smaller innova-tions in designs that allowed Citibank to save additional costs. In Citibank’s George-town data centre, for example, concrete-encased cooling towers can withstand winds of up to 175 mph, and landscaping with native plantings uses 50 percent less water than conventionally designed grounds.

AFCOM 2009-10 data centre trends survey and analysis conducted with 436 data centre sites reveal that the most important results they have experienced as a result of implementing green measures are:

How does a ‘multi-tiered’ data centre help in reducing costs?Businesses today operate on an assumption that more availability is always better. As a result, they build the entire data centre based on the highest availability required by critical applications. They invest in expen-sive, unnecessary and redundant infrastruc-ture along with specialised mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

A ‘multi-tiered’ approach to building data centres can increase efficiency and reduce capital costs by up to 25 percent. By 2013 about 70 percent of the data centre will use multi-tiered data centre approach. By using a multi-tiered data centre, customers would save millions of dollars while at the same time help make the data center scalable and more efficient.

Tell us about HP’s mobile data centre..HP’s mobile data centre is called POD (per-formance-optimised data centre) in which the data centre is present in a shipping container and hence it can be transported anywhere. The HP POD provides the criti-cal infrastructure components required to run a wide range of compute, storage and application functions.

It requires about 20 % less capital expen-diture than traditional brick and mortar data centres and is 50 % more energy efficient than typical data centre build-outs, reducing energy cost and carbon emissions.

SMEs who don’t want to make large investments but need high availability will use this product. It is also ideal for space-constrained companies looking to add capacity to their existing data centres.

What will be the key data centre trends in 2010? The traditional approach of building data centres is unsustainable. One of the clear trends we see is the adoption of multi-tiered approach. A growing concern is that of high power costs and cooling capacities. Design-ing a data centre which is energy efficient will become a priority. HP CFS can help companies save up to $300,000 by just mak-ing small changes in design without much investment. For instance, you can increase the UPS room temperature set point or shutdown 3 CRAC units.

GLOBAL TRACKER

SOURCE: AFCOM SURVEY 2009,

E N T E R PR I S E RO U N D - U P


2010 Will Be the Year for Cost Effective Storage. Will influence purchasing decisions.

STORAGE SECURITY

Organisations today store

all sorts of information in

electronic format. Much of this is

about the business itself, some is

personal about employees, clients

and associates, and some is more

general. Depending on several fac-

tors, some of this information may

be subject to government or indus-

try regulations; some of it may

even be classified that impacts

national security. While protecting

the data’s integrity and confiden-

tiality is always desirable, in many

cases it is mandatory, and failure to

comply may subject the company

to various charges.

Why, then, do companies fail to

properly secure data? It is impor-

tant to assess and classify data

according to its sensitivity and pro-

tect it accordingly. Strong security

is warranted for certain types of

data. Examples include:

Trade secrets that would put the

organisation at a disadvantage

Business financial information

details

Personal information, such as

employees’ or customers’ address-

es, phone numbers, social security

numbers, dates of birth, salaries,

etc. (unless required)

Client/customer information that

could be used by competitors

Details pertaining to lawsuits and

other legal matters

This is only a sampling; you may

have other types of data that need

to be protected.

—Source: www.windowssecurity.com

PERMABIT Technology Cor-

poration has outlined a series

of predictions for the data

storage industry in 2010. It

sees a “New Normal” occur-

ring in the storage market

which is driven by the need for

more cost effective purchase

and deployment of storage

across multiple tiers.

Dedupe Comes of Age —

Driven by cost reduction

and tight IT budgets, along

with the broad acceptance

and technology readiness;

deduplication will become a

requirement for all storage

purchases — NAS and block

level storage.

Primary Consideration —

Driven by the undeniable

economics of data reduction,

deduplication will be increas-

ingly deployed in primary data

stores.

Virtual Bloat is Solved —

Dedupe will be deployed

across all storage tiers, solv-

ing the problem of redundant

images and storage bloat.

Getting Cloudy — Cloud

storage will make inroads

in enterprise private cloud

deployments along with pub-

lic clouds for consumer and

the SMEs.

RAID continues to decline

— Driven by the realisation

that RAID does not provide

the scalability necessary to

adequately protect today’s

data stores, it will continue to

atrophy as a data protection

methodology.

Source: www.permabit.

com/pressreleases

SIFY Technologies recently announced the launch of its SLA (service level agreement) driven, utility-based ‘On-Demand’ storage service to manage the complete lifecycle of enterprise informa-tion - from its creation to the final disposal. The fully managed, util-

ity based, ‘On-Demand’, scalable storage platform is powered by Hitachi Data Systems.

Pradip J. Nath, Executive Presi-dent at Sify said, "The launch of our On-Demand Storage platform is a significant step towards Sify's journey towards building India's

best Cloud Infrastructure. Sify's integrated data centre, network, enterprise applications and pro-fessional support, gives us the edge in offering ‘On-Demand’ ‘Cloud Infrastructure' for compa-nies seeking dynamic scalability, business agility, high-availability and enterprise security across compute, storage, security and network platforms while reducing costs."

"Sify's ‘On-Demand’ Storage service powered by Hitachi Data Systems solutions is certain to benefit CIOs who are tasked with aligning IT objectives to business needs. The enterprises are moving towards service delivery model as it is cost effective and highly reliable. The unstructured data is very active but it stale quickly and hence such data can be moved to lower tiers,” said Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems.

The service also offers the indus-try leading availability guarantee of 99.99% on the storage system to meet specific application and busi-ness uptime requirements.

Sify’s four data centres are cur-rently operational and by October 2010 its fifth data centre (around 130,000 sq. feet) in the National Capital Region will be ready. —By Vinita Gupta

On-demand Storage. Powered by HDS, this will help CIOs to align IT with business.

requirement for all storage

purchases — NAS and block

ing the problem of redundant

across all storage tiers, solv-

images and storage bloat.

data stores, it will continue to

the scalability necessary to

adequately protect today’s

that RAID does not provide

deduplication will become a

FACT TICKER

Pradip J. Nath (left), Executive President at Sify, with Vivekanand

Venugopal, Vice President and GM, Hitachi Data Systems at the launch of

Sify's on-demand storage service.


A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS CH I P SA LYA RD S

CHIP SALYARDS | BMC SOFTWARE

in the DarkStop Walking

Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific of BMC Software in a conversation with Vinita Gupta speaks about the importance of Business Services

Management and BMC’s plans to augment its portfolio in India.

Business Service Manage-ment (BSM) is described as

the ability to see and use technol-ogy infrastructure from a busi-ness perspective rather than just capability tools. How would you expand on this basic definition from a CIO’s perspective? In any IT environment, incidents are an everyday affair. Even in organisa-tions where IT is at a high maturity level, these are common. They happen in many degrees of severity, but no mat-ter how minor, incidents can impact business through sever service disrup-tions if they are not quickly intercepted and resolved.

CIOs have now realised the need for a proactive approach to IT man-agement and thus are adopting best-practices frameworks, such as the IT

Infrastructure Library (ITIL). IT is making significant progress in antici-pating and meeting the needs of the business, becoming more integrated with business in the process. Busi-ness Service Management (BSM) is concerned with IT Service Manage-ment, helping organisations monitor IT infrastructure and services from a business perspective. BSM offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organisations cut cost, reduce risk, and increase profitability. BSM ensures that IT adds value to the business and doesn’t exist just as a cost centre.

According to CIOs, BSM tools solve only an isolated

part of their planning and man-agement puzzle, and thus they fail

to address business and IT com-plexities. How would you counter this argument?In today's environment, CIOs have to do more with existing assets and make sure new IT investments are beneficial. Managing various param-eters of the IT environment effi-ciently and effectively are essential steps in doing that, because without proper management and visibility, you may find yourself walking in the dark. Many customers and, more specifically, CIOs I personally speak to, recognise this.

Is there any example (global or India-specific) that comes

to your mind when it comes to implementing business service management?


A GOOD MARKET:Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacific, BMC Software says his company has bagged 22 new clients in India in recent times


A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS CH I P SA LYA RD S

Tata Motors Limited (TML), one of India’s largest automobile compa-nies, adopted BMC’s Remedy IT Service Management Suite to estab-lish a baseline of the IT application and infrastructure landscape across all technol ogy pillars. BMC applica-tions served as the software frame-work for managing the interactions and process relationships among all the support groups managing the IT infrastructure underlying business services.

BSM tools also played a key role in the rollout of Tata’s ambitious small car ‘Nano’ by helping to track and control all components of IT services and automating the management of the IT infrastructure, which was vital to the designing and planning of the plants that manufactured Nano as well as running day-to-day busi-ness processes. IT helped the com-pany shrink its design cycle time.

BMC recently launched the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite

‘On Demand’ solution. How will it help enterprises in adding new IT services and expedite the res-toration of service in case of an incident?BMC is applying next-generation technology along with best practices to help organisations achieve proac-tive IT operations quickly and cost effectively. With products such as BMC Event and Impact Management and BladeLogic Server Automation, Network Automation and Client Auto-mation, we will provide an integrated solution that helps organisations sim-plify, predict and automate IT.

Early this year, CA bought Oblicore, a company whose

software helps users monitor and manage their service level agreements across their IT infra-structures. Analysts see CA mak-ing a very clever acquisition with Oblicore; one that puts them a step ahead of their competition in cloud management and BSM. How do you view it?

What are the recent client wins and future plans of BMC

Software?BMC Software has grown over 30 percent in the Indian market and has bagged around 22 new clients. This growth is due to the increase in the adoption of BSM services by Indian enterprises to solve complex IT prob-lems. BMC APAC derives 20 percent of its revenues from BMC India.

BMC currently has more than 50 satisfied customers in India. Our cli-entele includes giants such as IDEA Cellular, Bharti-Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Tata Communications, Tata Motors, Reli-ance Communications, and Sahara. Some of the major deals for BMC in 2009 were: HCL – Xerox, TCL, plat-form deals at Wipro, TCS, Nokia, Sie-mens Network, BSNL, Tata Commu-nications and Indus Technologies.

—[email protected]

CA customers are now going to be chal-lenged with both service-level reporting and service catalog functionality from disparate products that are each built upon different architectures. This is an inherent flaw with the CA strategy of ‘design by acquisition’. In compari-son, BMC's strategy is ‘design from the ground up’ for BSM as well as for cloud computing. BMC pioneered the concept of BSM and has designed its products from the very beginning to work across disparate environments. For example, BMC’s SLM product provides customers the ability to track, measure and manage service levels in real time in an on-premise, virtual or cloud environments.

BMC is focused on helping organi-sations evolve from the classic on-premise IT infrastructure to virtualized datacenters, then to private cloud envi-ronments and ultimately hybrid clouds, which combine private clouds and public cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“BMC has designed its products from the beginning to work across disparate environments.”

That there

is a need

for proactive

approach to IT

management and

thus adopting a

best-practices

framework makes

sense

That a

service-oriented

organisational

structure is the

order of the day

THINGS I BELIEVE IN

NEXTHORIZONS

The Emergence of 'Fraud as a Service' The underworld has drafted well-defined SLAs to keep fraud customers happy Pg 16

FEATURES INSIDE

Negotiating is part of life. If you don't believe that then you've never had kids, a job, siblings, nor parents for that matter. My son understands

negotiation. At three years of age he is already trying to negotiate the best deal —tell him he can only have one of anything and he quickly moves to his primary negotiating tactic of "I want three." We sometimes settle at two, other times he loses that second in favour of an alternative—a song, a story, or maybe just some of my time during a busy day. Does he win? Yes, but only sort of. Winning while giv-ing the perception of losing is a fine art—one that the best CXOs understand very well.

Vendor strength - The great lieWithout getting into the various scenarios that can impede or complicate negotiations, it is safe to assume that most vendors tend to approach any new deal from the stand-point of being in the driver's seat. This is even more true when you contact them for information about their product or service. No matter what the situation is, these les-sons can help you shift the balance of power in any negotiation to your favour.

LESSON 1Know when to hold 'emThe vendor wants a sweet deal, you've been placed on a short leash in terms of spend-

ILLU

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TIO

N :

SA

NT

OS

H K

US

HW

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The Art of the Deal Lessons in Successful Vendor Negotiation. BY THOMAS STRUAN

N E X T H OR I ZO N S O RGA N I S E D FR AU D


ing, and you need to get the product/service/upgrade plan in place before year end (all cards that you play very close to your vest). Lesson 1 in the art of the deal — never, and I mean NEVER, put all your cards on the table. This is important because the only tool you have in negotiating with a vendor is knowl-edge — knowledge about your company, time table, budget, etc... Deciding when to divulge your knowledge is critical. My favou-rite tactic is to figure out how much stall time I have before I need to present a decision and then using as much of it as possible. Making them wait is often a key to ultimate success, but you cannot let them know when you need to make a decision — NEVER PLAY YOUR CARDS UP FRONT!

LESSON 2 Them that have the goldThem that have the gold make the rules!!! In negotiating you always have to figure out what the gold is and who has more of it. In many cases it is, pure and simple, CASH! For the vendor their gold is the services they perform or products they deliver. They put a value on their treasure and it is up to you as the negotiator to help them see that they need to surrender some of it. If this sounds like war that's because it is. Some wars are fought till the defeat of your enemy, others are fought over turf. My strategy is to always

(and I mean always) play down the other side's hand even when they call your bluff. Also, you should try to keep other options open so that, even if you end up paying a little more now, you can come back later and renegotiate with the same set of vendors.

LESSON 3 Go to the mattressesIn Godfather parlance this means getting ready to do battle. Negotiation means you have to study who you are up against. A common mistake is to invite a vendor in to speak with you without studying them in advance. When you are thinking of buying a new car you do some research and try to find the best deal. Well, vendor negotiation is very much the same. Don't be afraid to ask to speak to references beforehand — and tell them you will be wary of any reference that is too glowing. Part of Going to the Mat-tresses is respectfully undercutting the quote to a somewhat ridiculous level (if you ever get to that point with a vendor). Some might say that this is insulting, but there is nothing insulting about cold hard cash.

LESSON 4Playing hard to getIt is alright to play hard to get, so long as you understand that at some point you will want to dance with someone. You cannot

let your emotions get carried away and never under any circumstance get to a point of feeling sorry for a vendor or their repre-sentative — this is business and if you allow emotion to sway you then you can kill your own career in a hurry. That doesn't mean that you don't want to develop a relation-ship. Like I said, eventually you want to dance with someone, but keep in mind that the vendor is going to be looking after his bottom line so you had better be looking after yours.

Le coup de graceOnce you are at the point of signing on the dotted line you cannot forget that this is but one battle in a never ending war. Now, don't get the impression that your relationship with the vendor needs to be venomous. On the contrary, you need to develop a keen relation-ship with your vendor representatives and people in your vendor's back office. It is these relationships, often built during hard fought negotiations, that will largely determine the success of a partnership. Much respect can be earned for being a tough but fair negotiator. At the end of the day you need to be able to work with those you have contracted with.

—Thomas Struan is Principal and Senior Con-

sultant at Thomas Struan Consulting. Thomas is

also a Technology Advisor at Infotraxx Systems.

The Emergence of Fraud as a ServiceAre you aware that your competitor may be using FaaS to dethrone you? BY MIKE MEIKLE

In working with various clients on the topic of security, a com-mon theme has emerged.

Management and employees still labour under the percep-tion that fraud is still the purview of unorganised individuals with an axe to grind against a specific company.

Another popular opinion is that the company or individuals that

are experiencing fraud are the unfortunate victims caught in the blast of some hacker’s scatter shot attempt to make money. While sometimes true, the more likely explanation is far more disturbing.

Fraud as a service or FaaS for the acronym collectors, has been a topic of concern for security professionals since 2008.

RSA and others showcased this new trend emerging from the

underground economy around November of that year. The acronym itself was coined from the Software as a Service (SaaS) term.

Before we delve into the various facets of FaaS let us lay aside some of the assump-tions that we have about the hacker/phisher crowd.

Gone are the days where the primary theft is being perpetrated by the sociopath lone-wolf in the basement.

The major player is now organised crime, responsible for 70 percent of online fraud and billions in ill-gotten gains.

Organised crime generates more revenue with fraud than narcotics. For many not closely involved or interested in the security industry these are surprising facts.

Even more surprising are the business models that organised crime employs to maximize their profits. For the business-person the fraudster is your competitor—one who is not hindered by ethics and has highly talented people working for him. They also can function in a dark mirror image of corporate culture, complete with ROI studies and the white boarding of ideas.

With the backdrop properly set, we can now focus on the components of FaaS. Fraudulent activity is rapidly becom-ing based on Supply Chain Management (SCM).

Reviewing the SCM framework, this includes, outsourcing/partnerships, devel-opment, procurement, manufacturing flow management/support, distribution, perfor-mance management and customer support.

This translates into the underground economy and its fraud hosting services that are based on a subscription or flat-rate fee.

Once purchased, a fraud customer can review monthly status reports within a customer “dashboard” to check a current scheme’s profitability.

The services can include “All in One” Trojan suites, which provide the subscriber custom command and control tools over thousands of infected computers in a bot-net, from which you can direct a custom fraud campaign.

A Pay-Per-Infection service or Centralized Trojan Infection, where a subscriber (criminal groups) can use the fraud providers resources to target specific computers and then only pay for those computers that are successfully infected with the preferred Trojan.

HTML Injection (XSS) kits are commonly created and sold by the fraud service pro-vider as a means to soften targeted comput-ers for Trojan infection by using exploitable html code or as another method of gather-ing target data.

Customer Support is also available to answer subscribers' issues with their pur-chased package and Service Level Agree-

ments (SLAs) are discussed to ensure those perpetrating the fraud are provided the service for which they paid.

More specialized services offered are Phone Channel Fraud (Vishing), where the fraud service provider can spoof Caller ID numbers (ANI Spoofing) of financial insti-tutions, provide native language speakers for your target market and the ability for the fraudster to “cash out” their ill-gotten gains.

Another is Money-Muling or Mule-Herding.

Here the fraud service provider can rope innocent people into laundering money via wire services so criminals can cash out their profits from one compromised bank account to another.

The mules are then paid a percentage of the money transacted.

These mulling jobs are sometimes adver-tised as “Regional Managers” or “Money Transfer Agent, a growth market due to the economic downturn and subsequent large unemployment.

Much remains to be discussed regarding FaaS and security in general within the cor-porate environment, which cannot begin to be covered in just one short article.

However, it was the intent to provide a brief overview to hopefully chip away at the outdated concepts that surround online fraud and its ramifications to online and offline business.

—Mike Meikle is the CEO of Hawkthorne Group

and a Senior Consultant and Senior Programme/

Project Manager for several organisations across

government, health, telecommunications, corpo-

rate and education sectors, providing techno-

logical and organisational leadership.


Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are dis-cussed to ensure that those perpe-trating the fraud are provided the service for which they paid.

Spear Phishing Rears its Ugly Head

Spear phishing, or whal-

ing, is a form of phishing

attack that is mainly targeted

at employees or high-profile

targets in a business. Spear

phishing emails attempt to

get a user to divulge personal

or sensitive information or

click on a link or attachment

that contains malicious

software.

In its Online Fraud Report

for December 2009, RSA

uncovered a post in the

underground that shows a

fraudster soliciting the email

addresses of a company’s

CEO and top executives and

is willing to pay $50 for them.

Incidents of spear phishing

are increasing so rapidly that

the U.S. Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI) recently

issued a statement warning

the public of the threat.

O RGA N I S E D FR AU D N E X T H OR I ZO N S

cov er storyStor age Speci a l


e have not made any significant strides in storage virtualisation, and it is not on my cards for 2010,” said a CIO of an IT services company CTO Forum spoke to. The company has adopted server virtualisation in a significant manner, consolidating close to 150 servers across the globe to less than 30.

This sentiment is echoed by Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group. “We have already implemented virtualisation using LPARs (logical partitions) in the servers supporting our critical applications. We have also adopted blade servers to decrease our server footprint. Now we are in the process of implementing server virtualisation and plan to bring down 19 physical serv-ers to around two. There are no business imperatives currently to implement storage virtualisation since there are no significant constraints with regard to storage.”

In short, there are more pressing things in which to invest, so storage virtualisation is pushed down the list. For now.

Next year, things will be different. “We are evaluating the benefits of storage virtualisation and may consider it in the financial year 2011-12,” says Singh.

This is not to say all companies in India are slow to adopt storage virtualisation. Says Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank, “Our organisation has deployed virtualisation on Intel servers, AIX servers and on storage. We have more than 700 VMs (virtual machines) created on the x86 environment, 300 LPARs on AIX servers and more than 100 TB virtualised on storage. We have reached a certain maturity level, both in terms of usage and in our process, and our next step will be to implement cloud computing.”

This is a reflection of the storage growth needs of a company. Take a look at our survey of CIOs across various domains. From among the companies surveyed, those in the IT and the retail vertical have forecast similar storage growth requirements over the next one year (10-24%), as well as over the next 3-5 years (50-100%). Contrast this with the financial services industry, which forecasts 25-49% growth in storage requirements in the next one year, and between 100% to more

Gearing Up for Storage

Virtualisation

By Suma P

Storage virtualisation may not be high on the agenda for Indian companies, but CIOs are willing to

experiment in the future



than 300% over the next three-five years. Companies with spiral-ling storage needs are likely to be the ones embracing storage virtualisation earlier than the rest.

It is not always burgeoning storage needs that make compa-nies consider storage virtualisation. “The potential to cut infra-structure costs as well as operating costs, such as energy costs, are major business drivers. In our case storage virtualisation wasn't carried out to manage the growth in data, but to replace storage that had sweated enough. We have virtualised approxi-mately 12TBs of storage,” says TG Dhandapani, Group CIO of TVS Motor Company.

Why virtualise?

As storage needs increase over time in an organization, various storage media get added. And with this come a set of challenges. There is a lot of storage space available on paper, but in reality, due to the way the storage resources have been deployed, the storage space available for use is limited. To address the immedi-ate requirements, more space is bought, often in an unplanned manner. Net effect: a heterogeneous storage environment which becomes more and more difficult to manage, and increased expenses—not just those related to purchase of hardware and related software, but also for buying space, and paying energy and cooling bills.

In heterogenous environments, which are a combination of

NAS and SANs, and mul t ip le boxes, control-lers and media, the storage of infor-mation often ends being in silos. Reach-ing the right bit of data quickly frequently ends up being a time consuming process, and companies often set their IT teams to create work-arounds to be able to access the data. Migrating data from one storage media to another may be unpracticable in many companies. Hardly the most productive way to work, one could say. And not the fastest way either. Speed is of essence today.

Taking backups results in a lot of downtime for the application in question. With your business running day and night, can you afford to have downtime, even if it is for critical areas such as backup?

Enter storage virtualisation with its promise to end most of these woes. “Our investments in new storage boxes have

“The next phase of virtualisation adoption

will expand beyond servers into infrastructure virtualisation. Companies will realise the advantages

of advanced features for migration, business continuity and disaster

recovery (DR).”

“The Virtual Computing Environment coalition, formed jointly by Cisco and EMC with VMware

‘de-risks’ the infrastructure virtualisation journey of

customers to private cloud implementation.”

“With India being a strategic centre for many global

organisations, we see a good opportunity for storage virtualisation

here.”

SUBRAM NATARAJANExecutive IT Consultant, IBM

Systems and Technology Group

SANJAY LULLADirector, Technology Solutions,

India and SAARC, EMC Corporation

KISHOR WIKHESenior Vice President, Symphony

Services

Investment in new

data storage tech

No investment in new technology

Less than 25%

25% to less than 50%

50% to less than 25%

Others

SO

UR

CE

: C

TO

FO

RU

M S

UR

VE

Y

We asked the CIOs what percentage

of storage budgets will go in the new

technology deployments.

33%23%

25%

8%11%


reduced greatly,” says Dhandapani.Shetty of HDFC Bank says, “The

primary reason for embarking on stor-age virtualisation was to keep the cost of storage under control especially for backup, standby and reporting cop-ies. Secondly, we wanted to optimise storage utilisation and remove silos. Thirdly, segmentation or tiering of storage was needed to provide differ-ent classes of storage based on various requirements. Lastly, we also needed easy and transparent movement of data from one storage to another with-out any downtime to the application.”

Benefits

Shetty continues, “We have been able to reduce the cost of our standby, backup and reporting copies. We have also been able to introduce the con-cept of tiered storage. We have been able to retire old storage by moving data from one storage to another using virtualisation.”

That is in essence the benefits that storage virtualisation offers.

Bring in tiered storage: What this means is that you don’t need to buy expensive enterprise-class storage for all your needs. There are applications and processes which do not need the highest-end equipment. With virtuali-sation you can select which applications need what type of storage and allocate accordingly, even do so dynamically.

Simplify management: You can do away with having to work with multiple software to manage all the hardware.

Increase utilisation: Once all your storage hardware is made to act like one through virtualisation, it is easier to make optimal use of the available storage space.

Increase availability: Storage virtuali-sation makes it possible to backup data and carry out data migration on the fly. So your applications do not have to go offline as the backup or migration pro-cess is happening.

Reuse your existing hardware: Bring-ing in storage virtualisation does not mean having to give up boxes you

already have. They can easily be brought into the storage pool, and assigned data as per their capacity and efficiency. So your investment stays protected.

Companies are already well aware of the potential benefits. Says Singh of Aditya Birla Group, “We expect storage virtualisation to improve storage uti-lization, reduce complexity and man-agement overheads and also help with tiering and aligning storage to the right applications or uses.”

So what are the challenges? Shetty says, “We have not seen any challenges with storage virtualisation till date.”

The thought is echoed by Singh who adds, “Though we have not adopted storage virtualisation yet, a proper Return on Investment (RoI) needs to be carried out before implementing it. There can be benefits from storage vir-tualisation in environments with het-erogenous SANs and multiple storage families (low-end, mid-range and enter-prise storage models) provided that the virtualisation exercise is preceded by proper planning.”

Dhandapani suggests piloting a proj-ect. He says, “If the virtualisation proj-ects are taken when the hardware is due for replacement, the proving of RoI will be easier and convincing.”

“If one has huge amounts of data, migration will be a challenging task. But ultimately one will reap the benefits as the data grows further,” says IOC’s Gupta.

The benefits of storage virtualisa-tionare now well understood, but it is not high on the priority list of Indian CIOs. There are bigger issues at hand that need to be tackled. Saha says, “At Apeejay, the basic problem was the pro-liferation of multiple servers and not the proliferation of heterogeneous stor-age boxes. Hence we never had a need to provide for a single window solution for the management of storage boxes. Currently, we don’t find a need for stor-age virtualisation and hence we may not embark on this exercise in the near future.”

From a technology standpoint, Hitachi Data Systems has these capabilities: Storage Device Virtualisation: The abil-ity to virtualise any storage device at the controller level using open standards. Integrated virtualisation across block, file and content Volume capacity virtualisation which drives utilization, performance and non disruptive provisioning Virtual private storage that integrates with server virtualisation technologies Dynamic tiered storage with common software Non disruptive heterogeneous storage mobility with search capabilities

Vendor SpeakHitachi Data Systems

What About

“Globally, Hitachi Data Systems is the storage virtualisation leader

with more than 16,500 virtualisation solutions

sold. Half of these solutions are used in a heterogeneous storage landscape. The Indian

market offers significant opportunities for us.”VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL

Vice President & GM, Hitachi Data Systems



ou have seen virtualisation as a technology evolve over the years. Did you imagine it would be where it is now?I have been working with virtualisation when it wasn’t a buzzword. Virtualisa-tion, in my opinion, still masks the underlying problem that the CIO/CTO does not understand. We traded physical server sprawl for virtual server sprawl

all the while reducing our power requirements to prolong the life of our data centres and reduce soft costs that I don’t think anyone is really paying attention to or understands how to show the cost savings without buying yet another infrastructure component “managed KVM/PDU’s” and

In an email interview with CTO Forum, Robert Presley, former IT Director, GameStop (world’s largest video game and entertainment software retailer with over 6,200 retail stores) says he loves virtualisation but CIOs have lost their way and are now putting a

band-aid on the real problem.

What About

the Elephant inthe Room?



the software that goes with it.In my opinion, virtualisation is yet

to come of age – for instance, the soft-ware application requirements haven’t changed from the Windows 9x days. Then again you have to deal with the outdated mindset of application own-ers who say, “I don’t want VMware in my sand-box”. These issues have led to slower adoption. It just goes to show that major application software players have to drive harder to understand and “adapt” to the new requirements.

No one has addressed the fundamen-tal issue that if we don’t address the applications, and how they are deployed into production and break the cycle of “I need another server for my app, vir-tual or not” we can’t address the prob-lem. In a few years we will have the same problem we have now, with the same number of servers we started with and a much bigger issue of managing 1000’s of virtual machines on top of it. It is pure mismanagement — plain and simple — and the CIOs/CTOs won’t bring the infrastructure and application leadership together and address the “root cause”. Call it politics, ignorance, or just over-sight, the senior IT leadership has to step up and talk about the elephant in the room or else it “will not change.” I make no apologies for this statement and I simply don’t understand why it has gone unchecked for so long.

Virtualisation also eats up an unbelievable amount of SAN storage. The SAN/NAS arrays in our companies are two to three times what they should be. They are impacting the amount of data backed up downstream and ultimately the recovery costs. It is pure mismanagement of data. Again, senior leadership has to bring the infrastructure, database, and application teams together and “clean-up” the data.

CIOs have to see the big picture and get a CTO who sees the bigger picture and has vast experience in all the IT disciplines and not just one area. CIOs can't afford to ignore the untapped potential of consolidating applications.

Do you think an investment in virtualisation makes sense?

Virtualisation at the storage (SAN/NAS) level makes sense. In my opinion storage is so badly mismanaged that it grows out of control. Once this happens it affects a lot of things down stream like backups, DR, replication, etc. which in turn increases operating expense in those areas. By addressing the SAN/NAS data requirements, CIOs can save up to four times across the enterprise.

Storage virtualisation helps to offset the data sprawl. The

CIO should be able to show that he is going to cut 10 percent of the SAN/NAS purchases every year as a result or that the company is going to be smarter about data storage needs by buying less expensive SATA disks arrays.

What are those points that a CIO needs to be careful about?

While buying storage (especially SAN and high-end NAS arrays) CIOs need to understand that once you make a deal you are stuck unless you have a very understanding business and talented IT department to allow you to do storage migrations. When buying storage, you pay maintenance on the disks as well as the array and software. However, make sure that all maintenance is rolled for-ward and coterminous with the original SAN purchase because when you get your final expense bill on maintenance, it is going to be cheaper to buy the next “fastest” storage array rather than pay the expense.

Who would you say is the leader in storage virtu-alisation in the industry at this point? Is it IBM, HP,

Sun or Hitachi? How does iSCSI fit?This is a relative question and is based on your business need. EMC and HDS are on top for a reason and are the Ferrari’s of the SAN world. Everyone else resells everyone else. EMC is making huge strides with VMAX and HDS has always had a great prod-uct and generally pulled ahead in ease of management and sup-port. IBM is pulling hard to get back into the spotlight with the new IBM “XIV” SAN designed by the maker of the EMC DMX array. This looks very promising for ease of management and support. One thing that is sure is that CIOs need more visibility in the storage and HDS/IBM are doing this.

What does the future look like for storage virtuali-sation?

There should be better management, plain and simple. Give IT a way to better manage and support the SAN and continue the support with the latest network virtualisation features. What Cisco is offering in the Nexus platform is a great example.

I hope that CIOs will see the potential of virtualising their application and services. Think about it. If you were to just con-solidate your services onto a single Windows server you would maximize the use of the server, defer buying virtualisation soft-ware and maintenance and simplify your management of ser-vices and support.

“In a few years we will have the same problem we have now, with the same

number of servers we started with and a much bigger issue of managing 1000’s of virtual machines

on top of it.”ROBERT PRESLEYFormer IT Director,

GameStop



t isn’t making solid sense, not just yet. We are talking about solid state storage, the technology that has been around for years, but still hasn’t made inroads into the enterprise space in any major way. On the face of it, the technology makes a lot of sense. No moving parts, storage made from silicon chips, no spinning metal platters or streaming tape. This means increased durability,

faster access to data. Yet costs are still high, which has slowed adoption in the enterprise.But there is much more than meets the eye. Let’s look at where we are headed in this type

of storage.Benefits

Better access times: Compared to hard disk drives (HDD), flash memory offers faster access times and lower latencies. So while capacities of HDDs have grown exponentially, their read/write access times have not improved in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, the processing power of servers has been increasing, so the data access latency increases. Solid state storage comes as a useful alterna-tive here as it offers access times that are 100 to 1000 times that of drives with mechanical parts. It offers higher bandwidth throughput as well. Because of this, solid state storage offers very high random input/output per second (IOPS) performance.

Lower price/IOPS: The upfront costs for solid state storage devices can be huge, and working out one-to-one per terabyte costs versus HDDs will tilt the balance heavily towards the HDD side. But proponents of solid stage storage say that is the wrong parameter to base your decisions on. Instead it should be price/IOPS, where solid state storage scores higher over HDDs.

Reduced energy costs support green initiatives: Solid state storage devices use less energy as they don’t have any mechanical parts that need to be moved. This leads to lower cooling needs. And they are silent as well. But before diving into taking up solid state storage, do assess the way in which you would be using it for your kind of business. In case you need to opt for DRAM to enable faster write processes, the batteries to power the DRAM environment will have to be factored into your power and cooling needs.

Ashok K Gupta, Chief Information Systems Manager, Indian Oil Corporation, says “If questions related to energy efficiency are raised, solid state is the answer. But today it is not available off the shelf. Hence, we will have to wait for some time to replace conventional hard drives with solid state drives.”

In various forms: You can have solid state storage on form factors of HDD, so that you can

Towards the Solid State

By Team CTOF

We are heading there but not so soon. High costs and the lack of a tech roadmap are delaying SSD

deployments



IBM is making solid-state storage affordable with innovative architectures, system and application integration, and management tools that enable effective use of solid-state storage. IBM says the new offerings boost performance by as much as 800 percent, while reducing physical storage footprint and energy

consumption by 80 percent. IBM is add-ing flash drives to its power systems and

expanding its x Series offerings.

Innovative flash-based drive technol-ogy combined with Hitachi's virtualised storage services platform is designed to provide good performance of business-critical applications, with improved uti-lization, while also reducing power and

cooling consumption.

Vendor SpeakIBM

HDS

What are your key findings about the storage market in India? Is it

poised to grow? Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk stor-age revenue totaled more than US$3.9 billion in the Q3 of 2009, a 7.3 percent decline compared to Q3 of 2008.

The Indian ECB market dropped a significant 20 percent year-on-year basis and totaled US$ 43 mil-lion in 2009. IBM (23.4 percent), EMC (21percent) and Sun Microsystems, now acquired by Oracle, (18.5 percent) continued to be the top three storage players and together accounted for 61 percent market share of all ECB revenues in India in the last quarter.

While the previous three quarters saw a downturn in the storage industry, there was a strong surge in demand during the month of September.

Companies are facing challenges such as low utili-sation of available storage, junk machines due to

Aman Munglani, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner India says 2010 will be a fairly strong year for the external storage market vis-a-vis 2009 that

saw negative growth.

continue to use your existing storage arrays. At the same time you can also have them in other forms as well that can take smaller form factors.

Harish Shetty, Executive Vice Presi-dent, HDFC Bank says, “Solid state drives will have limited usage because of the difference in costs. Wherever there are challenges with data centre infrastructure and performance is a big concern, SSD will definitely be an option. We foresee an increase in adop-tion of SSDs and consequently a drop in their prices.”

The flip side

Costs are still high: While the costs for solid state storage devices have been coming down steadily over the years, they still remains high, as far as most vendors are concerned. “Everybody would like to switch to SSD as soon as the costs come down. The present cost is many times higher than motorised hard disks. We may start switching over to SSD when the cost is around two times that of the HDD,” says Gupta.

Price/capacity scores will remain low: As is the case, the price of HDDs have been falling too, especially for higher capacities. So price per GB has been falling. Solid state storage is still very expensive, so in price per GB compari-sons, hard drives will score better than solid state storage.

But prices will come down in the long run. In January 2010, in its worldwide 2009-2013 Solid State Drive Forecast Update, IDC said, “Pricing remains a key metric for SSD adoption in all market segments. The slowdown in IT spending over the past 18 months has led to production cutbacks in NAND semiconductors, subsequently slowing overall SSD price reductions. However, the long term decline in the cost of NAND memory will trans-late into lower price points for SSDs. These lower price points, coupled with increased SSD capacities, will make them a compelling alternative to HDDs in certain market segment.”

Complex write process: Reading flash memory is rapid, but one cannot say the same thing for the write process, as

Tiered Storage

gaining ground

IBM is making solid-state storage affordable with innovative architectures, system and application integration, and management tools that enable effective use of solid-state storage. IBM says the new offerings boost performance by as much as 800 percent, while reducing physical storage footprint and energy

consumption by 80 percent. IBM is add-ing flash drives to its power systems and

expanding its x Series offerings.

Innovative flash-based drive technol-ogy combined with Hitachi's virtualised storage services platform is designed to

Vendor Speak

Price/capacity scores will remain low: As is the case, the price of HDDs have been falling too, especially for higher capacities. So price per GB has been falling. Solid state storage is still very expensive, so in price per GB compari-sons, hard drives will score better than solid state storage.

But prices will come down in the long run. In January 2010, in its worldwide 2009-2013 Solid State Drive Forecast Update, IDC said, “Pricing remains a key metric for SSD adoption in all market segments. The slowdown in IT spending over the past 18 months has led to production cutbacks in NAND semiconductors, subsequently slowing overall SSD price reductions. However, the long term decline in the cost of NAND memory will trans-late into lower price points for SSDs. These lower price points, coupled with



duplicate data and so on. Storage virtu-alisation, de-duplication along with VTL (virtual tape library), thin provisioning and tiered storage technology will gain ground.

Storage virtualisation technology has been there from quite some time but it has gained traction only now. De-dupli-cation, if effectively adopted, can save huge revenues because every company has tons of duplicate data clogging up file servers. Large enterprises in BFSI and telecom sector have already started using tiered storage.

Do you think cloud storage will gain prominence?

I am afraid cloud-based services are still evolving. The concept of cloud-based storage is still raw but if you have stor-

age with other infrastructure like serv-ers, network, etc. in the cloud environ-ment, it will grow.

A company can save a lot of costs sign-ing up for the could service as opposed to buying storage. For instance, if a compa-ny’s storage requirement is 20 terabytes (TB), but suddenly for a particular proj-ect it requires 20 terabytes more then the company can buy the additional storage from the service provider without adding that additional capacity which will other-wise go waste during off-peak time.

It's a myth that the real growth in this area will come from SMBs; large enter-prises are also looking at it — specially for their application-based services like back-up and recovery.

What will drive the storage market in 2010?

Gartner predicts a strong year for the external storage market in 2010. We are predicting a 13-14 percent growth in the overall external storage revenues in 2010.

While traditional buyers such as BFSI, telecom and manufacturing will contin-ue to invest in external storage, there are other emerging verticals that will fire up this whole market. Government is the fastest growing vertical in India and will play a significant role in the growth of the external storage market. Addition-ally, retail and medical archival systems are two other emerging verticals that will fuel demand. —By Vinita Gupta

this process is more complex, and takes longer. For enterprise-class storage, faster writing is enabled by using an intermediate cache to hasten the processes up, or using multiple flash chips in parallel, which would be faster than going the sequential way. However, this may not be the right solutions for all businesses.

Reliability: Issues have been raised about the performance, endurance and reliability of flash memory devices. Over the years, solid state storage devices have improved on all these grounds, and now build in clever controllers that enable better performance and endurance of the memory.

Teamed up with HDD

Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the enter-prise space anytime soon. They will co-exist. In fact new storage virtualization offerings build in support for SSD arrays now, thus strengthening their entry into data centres.

The area that SSDs are replacing HDDs is short stroking, a way in which storage administrators leave the outer areas of hard drives empty to enable faster reads. This means that there is a lot of unused space across all HDDs. Replacing them with fewer SSDs turns out to be more optimal, improves perfor-mance significantly, and takes up lesser space.

In a company, there would be loads of data which need to be stored, but are not accessed frequently. For many applications, your current storage media would work just fine. SSDs will find favour wherever speed is of essence. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) identifies some killer applications

fo r so l id state stor-age . Flash SSD is best for business notebook com-puter storage, while cached flash RAID SSD’s killer applications are data warehousing, video on demand, seismic processing and render-ing. DDR RAM SSD is great for write-intensive online transaction pro-cessing, web transaction databases, mission critical data warehousing, etc.

Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group believes, “Solid state drives can be exploited for lower capacities and come with the promise of improved reliability, speed and energy efficiency. However, its cost/performance and scalability claims are yet to be proven.” Shetty concurs, “The current challenges are with most vendors taking time in designing their storage boxes with SSDs. We hope to see a major change in this space soon.”

this process is more complex, and takes longer. For enterprise-class storage, faster writing is enabled by using an intermediate cache to hasten the processes up, or using multiple flash chips in parallel, which would be faster than going the sequential way. However, this may not be the right solutions for all businesses.

Reliability: Issues have been raised about the performance, endurance and reliability of flash memory devices. Over the years, solid state storage devices have improved on all these grounds, and now build in clever controllers that enable better performance and endurance of the memory.

Teamed up with HDD

Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the enter-Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the enter-Solid state drives are not going to replace HDDs in the enterprise space anytime soon. They will co-exist. In fact new storage virtualization offerings build in support for SSD arrays now, thus strengthening their entry into data centres.

The area that SSDs are replacing HDDs is short stroking, a way in which storage administrators leave the outer areas of hard drives empty to enable faster reads. This means that there is a lot of unused space across all HDDs. Replacing them with fewer SSDs turns out to be more optimal, improves perfor-

fo r so l id state stor-age . Flash SSD is best for business notebook com-puter storage, while cached flash RAID SSD’s killer applications are data warehousing, video on demand, seismic processing and render-processing and render-processing and rendering. DDR RAM SSD is great for write-intensive online transaction pro-cessing, web transaction databases, mission critical data warehousing, etc.

Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group believes, “Solid state drives can be exploited for lower capacities and come with the promise of

Growth in data

storage in 2010

10%-24%

25%-49%

50%-74%

75%-99%

Don't know

Less than 10%

More than 100%

SO

UR

CE

: C

TO

FO

RU

M S

UR

VE

Y

Expected percentage growth in data

storage in the next 12 months in Indian

enterprises

2%2%

2%8%

44%

34%

10%



usiness users are not ready for cloud storage,” is the verdict of a report from Forrester released in January this year. The report is based on a hardware survey conducted in 2009 and sums up the sentiment, not just across the globe, but here in India as well.

Why is it so, despite all the talk and interest garnered by the ‘cloud’? And what is cloud storage anyway, the definition being as foggy as the name. Overtime, cloud storage has come to mean data storage made available over a network as a service, but is also hugely scal-able and is billed on a usage basis. It is also application agnostic, which means saving data on a cloud application will not count as cloud storage. Cloud storage is also not limited to any specific location, and is based on commodity components. IDC says cloud is a way to describe an infra-structure designed to deliver storage as a service.

All the talk and interest about cloud storage has been centred on the benefits cloud can bring to an enterprise. It is meant to help you control burgeoning costs of storage, improve the efficiency of data centres, and reduce the complexity of technology. You are not dependent on a single server, nor is there any direct dependency on the underlying hardware. You don’t have to buy space in anticipation of growth, you just add as you grow. You can manage it all from a single point.

However many companies are still grappling with basic issues related to cloud storage. Vive-kanand Venugopal, Vice President & GM, Hitachi Data Systems says, “The key issue slowing adoption of cloud storage is the lack of clear realistic business models and pricing models. Band-width usage and security are other factors slowing adoption.”

It seems unrealistic to expect enterprises to move their storage to the cloud anytime soon. Most enterprises have put in huge investments into their storage environments, and do not see a con-vincing reason to rip it all up and move to the cloud, especially when data security is paramount.

Among the various segments of cloud storage, it is cloud backup that is expected to see quicker adoption. IDC calls it one of top five applications for the cloud in 2010.

With cloud backup, companies can recover their data quickly while paying only for the ser-

Cloud Storage: Yet to Take Off

By Suma P

The service is still evolving and is yet to make it to the priority list of CIOs





storage setup, a good look at cloud storage could be well worth your while. But if you have high-transaction databases, it’s best to not put those on the cloud. Nor is the cloud a good option for temporary storage. But if you have storage demands that are hard to accurately predict, you are a good candidate for cloud storage. Or if you need a storage tier that doesn’t cost a bomb, or need cheap long-term archiving, cloud storage is a good option.

Private, Public or HybridThe real costs benefits of the cloud cannot be realized if com-

panies opt for a private cloud wherein they buy, configure, man-age and support their own hardware and software. There are only a handful of organisations which would require this kind of involvement and investment. Already IT and storage teams are unable to manage the enterprise IT infrastructure complexity on a daily basis, and this would strain the teams further, even putting availability of the infrastructure at risk.

But companies are wary. Aditya Birla Group’s Singh says, “If the cost models can offer compelling value, private cloud would seem to be able to offer the capability more in line with what would work well for core applications. We may carry out a POC (Proof Of Concept) using the public cloud for email services after thoroughly evaluating the costs and security aspects of the same.”

Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank, says, “Cloud for storage is important in enterprises. If the cloud is internal, there is investment required. We have already created a cloud for storage inside the organisation by providing storage on demand. We are in the process of refining the same. There are challenges with using an external cloud.”

He continues, “A hybrid model would work best in our ver-tical. There is a need to balance security and cost saving, so com-panies will experiment with the hybrid mode for their non-critical systems first before they move to the public mode.”

There is a definite interest in the cloud for the cost benefits it brings. But companies are also exercising caution. There are more questions than answers right now. Some of them are: Will my data be secure? The cloud may be available as per the SLAs, but would I be able to access my data easily? What about latencies? How does virtualisation fit into all this?

These questions need to be addressed before cloud storage can really take off, not just in India but globally.

vices they need. And this can easily be woven into the company’s disaster recovery plan. However, companies are not very keen on putting their primary storage on to the cloud, at least not just yet.

Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group, says, “Enterprise cloud storage is still evolving. For the mass market of individual consumers, cloud storage seems to offer great benefits at acceptable risks. However, enterprises will still be hesitant to completely put all their business critical and valu-able information on the cloud without a proper scrutiny of the service. The exercise of moving to the cloud will require detailed planning to ensure a successful transition.”

Who can opt for cloud storage? If you are starting off with your

“Lack of a realistic business model is hampering

adoption of cloud computing. Bandwidth

usage and security are the other issues.”

“Enterprises will be hesitant to put all

their business-critical information on the

cloud without properly scrutinising the service.”

VIVEKANAND VENUGOPALVice President & GM, Hitachi Data

Systems

NEERAJ PAL SINGHSenior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla

Group

importance of data deduplication

SOURCE: CTO FORUM SURVEY

Deduplication as a solution to de-clutter the data is high on enterprise agenda

1%5%

11%

28%

3%Not at all importantNot very important

Somewhat importantVery

importantCritical


n the last few years, a lot of efforts have been directed towards making hard-ware energy efficient. However, its mostly the server architecture that has been the focus of attention and research. Now, vendors are developing ways to make storage energy efficient too.

Get the big picture

You cannot drive efficiencies in the storage setup without a good understanding of your data, a knowledge of how the storage has been provisioned, what capacities are being used, and so on. This will bring to fore the underutilised capacities, the type of data stored on various devices, and so on. And it will give you a very good idea of how to bring in efficiencies. Should you consolidate, virtualize, replace some hard drives with solid state drives, look for drives with special power sav-ing features…you will come up with your list.

Consolidate

Do you really need multiple small capacity HDDs for your data, or can you replace them with a few bigger ones? Or can you replace the small capacity HDDs with the same number of higher capacity ones—this will increase your capacity, but keep your power needs the same.

VirtualiseWith storage virtualisation you can provision storage to fewer physical drives and thus improve

the levels of utilisation. With thin provisioning, you can have capacity allocated when you need them, and not have to provision space in anticipation.

MakeStorage Green

By Suma P

Energy efficiency in storage infrastructure can bring real gains to enterprises, besides helping them cut down

on carbon emissions



Bring in energy efficient com-ponents

Drives, controllers, arrays…all these components pack energy saving mechanisms. There are drives that support various spin-dle speeds so that they can slow down when data is not being accessed. Controllers that use less power are now available. You could also opt for smaller drives that fit into your storage arrays, but which will consume far less power.

Try new energy savers

Opting for solid state drives translates into lower power costs as there are no mechanical parts that are made to move. They have smaller footprints, and thus save space as well. MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) enables powering down multiple disks at any given time.

Explore FCoE

Using Fibre Channel over Ethernet, you can consolidate the network (IP) and SAN traffic through a single switch. This helps

you reduce the number of network interface cards you need to deploy to connect the storage and IP networks. FCoE also brings down the number of switches you need and the amount of cables required. And it reduces power and cooling costs. How-ever, FCoE may not be the solution for all storage setups. You must do a cost-benefits analysis before you opt for it.

Go back to tape

Tape is the most power efficient media of all. So with all these efforts to control costs to stay on the right side of green, there is a renewed interest in using tape.

Dedupe

Removing duplicates of your data releases storage capacity. And also save your bandwidth usage. This brings in efficiencies.

Tier your storage

Put the most-accessed data on expensive high-speed storage devices, and move the less-accessed data to lower-speed cheaper devices. That’s tiering of storage. However, you might want to


Storage Allocationis an Issue

re-look at your storage setup to see if tiering has been deployed optimally. Software that enables the moving of data across tiers in a seamless man-ner also ensures that there are many takers for tiering.

Measure efficiency

This is a tough one. While the US Environmental Protection Agency has embarked on its project to bring in green storage specifications, there is plenty of work still left to be done. EPA is aiming to develop an Energy Star rating for storage equipment. While all vendors claim efficiencies, there are no real standards available to help a customer measure how energy efficient the devices really are. With specifications and metrics likely to make an appearance shortly, ven-dors will be helping customers under-stand their device efficiencies. There are also discussions on various mod-els for measuring efficiency, such as those that measure energy consumed when data is at rest, others that mea-sure energy consumption when data is being accessed at typical rates, and so on.

Dispose in a green way

You might be looking at retiring your old storage devices. Being able to dis-pose them off in an eco-friendly man-ner is also a matter that falls under your green storage initiatives. Check with your storage vendors about the disposal processes and opt for them.

There are many ways to go green in the enterprise storage space. Green storage is a lot about driving efficien-cies through virtualisation, informa-tion lifecycle management, and using intelligent software. However, all this requires you to dive deeply into your data and understand how it is being stored and read, and then arrive at a storage strategy that focuses on deliv-ering business benefits while keeping the costs in check.

ow is the disk storage market performing in

India? In Q3 (July-September) 2009, IDC estimates the revenue for the India disk storage systems market to be US$ 62 million, a decline of 11.4% year-on-year (over Q3 2008) and 3.9% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009). In terms of new capacity, the market saw a growth of 13.9% year-on-year (over Q3 2008) and 13.0% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009).

EMC leads the India disk storage systems market for Q3, 2009 with a 27% market share in terms of facto-ry revenue followed closely by IBM. EMC and IBM have been vying for the top slot for last few quarters on the basis of some strong gains in the government, telecommunications and financial services verticals.

How challenged are enter-prises in storing and man-

aging their data?Most of the data created in enterpris-es today is unstructured and dupli-cated. Most enterprises keep pro-duction environment data on Tier 1

storage and after a certain number of days move it to secondary storage. Thus, judicious allocation of storage, based on importance and require-ments, is an issue. Also, retrieving data for further use is another major concern for enterprise IT managers.

Are companies actually adopting storage virtuali-

sation or is it just a hype?As a trend, storage virtualisation has started receiving due attention in India, specially from verticals such as banking and financial services, manufacturing and telecommuni-cations but actual adoption is still in a nascent stage with approximately 8% of Indian enterprises adopting the same during 2008-09. Vendors are seeing a stronger uptake in large enterprises and select mid-sized companies.

Will the adoption of cloud storage be driven by ser-

vice providers?

Increasingly ‘storage-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud storage’ will be driven by Tele-

Aniket Dongre, Lead Analyst, Enterprise Storage and Solutions Practice at IDC India spoke to CTO

Forum about the storage market in India.



com Service Providers (TSPs) or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to service enter-prise customer requirements as they look at providing value added services (VAS) and also utilising their infrastruc-ture better.

The networked storage market was flat in 2009. Is

it expected to rebound with 20% growth in 2010?Networked storage will see increased adoption in 2010 to meet demands aris-ing from expansion plans of the IT/ IteS

and telecom companies as well as to sup-port enterprise IT initiatives like data centre consolidation, business continu-ity and disaster recovery (BCDR).

What new opportunities do you see in the near future?

The economy in India is improving and financial results for most enterprises for the second and third quarters of 2009 have shown promising signs. Customers have started spending again on storage infrastructure.

India’s disk storage systems market

is increasingly driven by business con-tinuity and disaster recovery solutions and enterprises have invested heavily on building the same even during the recent economic downturn. This trend has also helped drive the overall storage solutions market.

Increasingly, unified storage platforms will find adoption in enterprises; VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) will drive the adoption of high end storage solutions in future.

—By Vinita Gupta

achin Jain, CIO and CISO of Gurgaon-based Evalueserve had a challenge at hand. The company had cross-functional teams that worked from differ-ent locations. These teams ended up working on the same document and creating multiple copies of it and storing them separately. This resulted in duplication of data and consumed around 30 to 40 percent of the overall

storage space.“We realised that our storage was not being utilised efficiently and we wanted to address this

issue immediately,” says Jain who decided to go for a data deduplication solution to reduce cost, control data growth, reduce storage requirements and improve performance.

Similar to Jain, many enterprises acknowledge the fact that as the amount of primary data within

Doing More With Less

By Ashwani mishra

With data growing at an exponential rate, enterprises are looking at data deduplication as a way to reduce

storage costs and increase efficiency

Continue on Next Page





organisations continues to grow, the amount of duplicate occu-pies significant amounts of storage infrastructure. Redundant data quickly consumes storage resources at an alarming rate, driving up business costs through increased storage purchases and management. Within no time, storage consumption grows exponential and becomes extremely difficult to control.

Benefits galore

With deduplication, only “unique” data is written during the backup process, which means that significantly less disk capac-ity is needed on the back-end to store changes. This offers a number of important business benefits such as reduced capex and opex costs.

Most importantly, organisations can reduce backup win-dows and improve restoration times by using disk versus tape. Recovery time objectives (RTOs) will improve because data can be recovered from disk. With more capacity available, IT may choose to increase the frequency of backups conducted during the day, improving recovery point objectives (RPOs).

“Data deduplication also facilitates server virtualisation deploy-ments as it eliminates much of the disadvantages of server virtu-alisation projects,” says Surajit Sen, Director–Channels, Market-ing and Alliances, NetApp India.

Virtual machine disk images contain highly redundant data and increase stor-age capacity requirements. Through serv-er virtualisation, enterprises can reduce the amount of servers in their environ-ments and through deduplication they can reduce the amount of storage.

Though data deduplication is an impor-tant technology that is quickly being embraced by users as they struggle with issues of data proliferation, enterprises must ensure that they make the right choice while selecting providers.

Making the right pick

It is expected that the amount of stor-age will be reduced with deduplication solutions. However, the results will vary depending on the technology one chooses and the type of data that is being dupli-cated. Marketing brochures that claim large deduplication ratios are simply an indication of what is possible in the best case scenario and may not be achievable in each and every environment.

“It is important for enterprises to quan-tify. Many storage providers offer estima-tion tools or tests that provide a more real-

istic expectation of what can be delivered,” says Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Management and Data Protection, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems.

There are a few problems that CIOs can encounter when they look at various deduplication solutions. One of the most criti-cal among them appears in the scenario when data deduplica-tion is applied utilising proprietary formats. Here data is written directly into the file headers. These headers describe the man-

ner in which data has been deduped and provide pointers to applications. These applications are assured that they will get the right access to the copy of the data required. According to industry analysts the system of pointers that results from these solutions can lead to some perfor-mance degradation.

“Our choice of the provider will only be finalised only after considering all aspects of design, including space sav-ings, efficiency, performance overhead, and resiliency,” says Vijay Kumar, Chief Manager - Information Technology of Bangalore-based The Himalaya Drug Company which is also looking at a data deduplication solution for their storage environment.

Jain from Evalueserve adds that the choice of a data deduplication solution should be based on how effectively the solution fits within the storage environ-ment. “The solution should come from a reputed vendor who has experience in this technology,” he adds.

Data deduplication will become a criti-cal enabling technology. Besides, it can be successfully paired with other emerging storage technologies including thin pro-visioning and virtualisation.

Evalueserve plans to address the chal-lenge of data replication using a two-

pronged strategy.In the first step, the company has set

a rule to automatically archive data that is not being used in the last six months.

This data will be moved to a second-ary storage that is less expensive. This method will improve performance and

also save storage space.In the second step, the data deduplica-

tion solution will be applied to the data that has been stored on the secondary

storage. This will remove duplicate data from the archived storage. After carrying out the deduplication implementation on the secondary storage environment,

the company will use the solution on the primary storage environment as well. The entire process is likely to be completed in

the next six months.

Data Deduplication Strategy at Evalueserve

SOURCE: CTO FORUM SURVEY

changing dynamics

of data storage

Storage Virtualization

FibreChannel SAN

iSCSI SAN

Data deduplication

Disk backup

Tape backup

Disaster recovery solutions

Compliance solutions

Already invested in SAN

Don't know

Enterprise preference for new storage

technologies

8%

44%

34%

10%1%1%21%

15%

14%16%

12%

7%

8%

5%



ymantec feels the key challenge for enterprises this year would be

not just managing storage architecture but also managing storage resources and the data explosion. The utilisation of storage resources is still low and hence needs to be optimised.

Storage management software like archiving and storage virtualisation that assist organisations in automating IT policies will be of prime importance this year.

“Users are increasingly turning to technologies such as thin provisioning to make better use of existing storage. Thin provisioning will provide organisa-tions the ability to deploy 'thin' storage, reclaiming storage during online migra-

tions and driving operational efficiency,” feels Darshan Joshi, Vice President, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec.

Enterprises should also focus on incor-porating a comprehensive data protec-tion strategy within their IT strategy irrespective of backing up data to tape or disk.

Symantec recently launched FileStore, a new solution enabling organisations to build scalable, high-performance file-based storage services - including pri-vate and public clouds. The solution can manage and protect critical information, scale performance and capacity non-dis-ruptively as application needs change. —By Vinita Gupta

here's a catch with cloud storage, says Robert Healey, Marketing Evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed Technol-

ogy. “Moving your company’s data storage to someone else’s data centre half-way across the world, while potentially cheaper than building in-house infrastructure, will have huge impact on performance,” he says. The same performance degradation is experienced by cloud-based software applications as distance and network latency across the WAN grows.

To solve the application performance problems caused by the distance between the enterprise and their cloud operator’s remote data centre, cloud-specific WAN optimisation technology is the only clear solution, Healey feels. Using it in storage envi-ronments allows companies to back up and restore more data quickly, while reducing costs. “Our new cloud-storage optimisa-tion technology promises to reduce both cost and complexity for cloud storage services — without any impact on performance,” he says.

The company has recently announced the release of the its WAN optimisation device Steelhead 7050, which uses the new Solid State Disk technology, has 10GE network interfaces and can de-duplicate (compress) storage and other traffic across the WAN at multi-Gigabit rates.

“We are working towards the release of cloud-specific ver-sions of its products to accelerate remote access to cloud-based software applications and storage services. This technology is already in trial stages and is showing unprecedented throughput and performance,” says Healey. —By Vinita Gupta

Riverbed’s Cloud-specific WAN

Optimisation Tech

High Performance File-Based Storage Services is

Symantec’s Pick

“Users are increasingly turning to technologies

such as thin provisioning”

DARSHAN JOSHIVP, Storage and Availability

Management Group, Symantec


t a time, when companies are looking to increase performance and capacity, simply adding storage

may result in inefficient silos while taking the physical data centre/storage room to their limits. More than ever, companies need to get the most out of their technology investments. For this reason, technologies such as vir-tualisation and automation will continue to gain traction as they help businesses drive down costs, feels Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Storage Works Division, HP India.

nterprises have spent a lot of money on storage systems. However, the storage efficiency in data

centres for most of the enterprises has been as low as 30 to 35 percent. So increasing storage efficiency will be high on the priority for CIOs this year, feels Surajit Sen, Direc-tor, Channels, Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India.

Thin provisioning and data deduplication can be con-sidered as some of the other key solutions to increase storage utilisation and reduce costs.

Storage virtualisation is another area that enterprises will look at this year. “We have seen massive deployments of server virtualisation. Desktop virtualisation is gaining momentum. However, enterprises should realise that to achieve the larger objective of virtualisation, they have to virtualise their storage environment as well,” feels Sen.

The advent of cloud computing has brought big chang-es to storage strategies, with customers craving pricing models that align with usage and systems that can man-age ever-increasing data volumes. Moving forward, this model will be crucial in the evolution of enterprise data centres. Enterprises should look at service providers that are uniquely positioned to deliver solutions to suit to enterprise architectural or operational decisions.

GigaOM on NetApp: NetApp is making a big push as a provider of storage infrastructure for cloud service provid-ers. The company has been a leader in the growing data deduplication space, but that status when jeopardized when EMC stole Data Domain from NetApp’s grasp. —By Ashwani Mishra

Convergence of infrastructure along with storage vir-tualisation will be two key trends. Converged infrastruc-ture brings together pools of networking, storage, servers, management software, power and cooling in one single environment, allowing organisations to easily build an elastic infrastructure.

“Storage plays a critical role in the converged infra-structure by allowing customers to virtualise stored data and create a unified virtual resource pool that is instantly accessible to support changing business needs,” feels Krishnamoorthy.

HP feels that some of the future opportunities in stor-age will revolve around areas like cloud-based storage and solid state drives (SSDs). “This year we will see more companies take advantage of cloud computing to cut costs and become more agile in a world of data explo-sion,” he feels.

SSDs, are still in the early phase of adoption, but these drives are increasingly making their way into everyday consumer PCs and enterprises. “As more vendors con-tinue to enter the market with SSDs and volumes start to increase, the end-user price of the technology will con-tinue to decline,” feels Krishnamoorthy. —By Vinita Gupta

Hewlett Packard Bets on Cloud

and SSDs

“The end-user price of solid state drive technology will continue to decline”PRAKASH KRISHNAMOORTHYCountry Manager, HP StorageWorks.

It’s Storage Virtualisation

for NetApp

“Virtualising the storage environment will help reap

maximum benefits from virtualisation”

SURAJIT SENDirector, Channels Marketing and

Alliances, NetApp India



ccording to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), the trend for enterprises this year would be to look at a ‘single data stor-

age platform’ to reduce storage costs and simplify management.“Storage virtualisation, dynamic tiered storage and file and

content services would be our three main focus areas for enter-prise customers this year. These solutions would help them reduce costs by around 20 to 30 percent and increase efficiency,” says Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Man-ager, India, Hitachi Data Systems.

“We are also betting high on storage virtualisation this year. It has the potential to simplify storage administration, allocation and reallocation of resources and reduce the costs involved in managing different storage assets,” adds Venugopal.

Enterprises must not think of virtualisation as a point product. It should be an important part of their long term infrastructure strategy.

ell feels that storage optimisation will be a major trend in enter-

prise storage environments this year. “What we are looking at is to create cost-effective archiving solutions to bet-ter manage record retention, as well as assist in migrating lower-tier storage to lower-cost platforms, which can dramati-cally cut total storage costs,” says Phil-lip A. Davis, Vice President, Solutions, APAC and Japan, Large Enterprise Busi-ness Unit, Dell. “In addition, enterprises should also look at data deduplication to save storage costs,” he feels.

Consolidation of storage will result in fewer licenses to manage, better utili-sation of each device and operational expenditure savings. For this enterprises can look at tiered storage. Disaster recov-ery and compliance are other key areas that will continue to see adoption.

The RoI on storage consolidation using our solutions could be around 30

Dell’s take: Storage

consolidation all the way

Dynamic Tiered Storage is HDS’

Mantra

spent on Ethernet and IP as compared to Fibre Channel. It has more recently moved on to 8 GB but there is no road-map beyond 16 GB Fibre Channel and they have proved expensive.

“Dell already has the 10 GB Ethernet in the market and 40 GB is well defined. They are easier to deploy, manage and virtualise as compared to Fibre Channel that increases complexity,” says Davis.

IDC on DellDell has built a full line of storage relate services and tools that address enter-prise needs. Through a combination of in-house expertise and strategic partner-ships, Dell is in a position to address customer needs for storage solutions that go beyond technology and ultimate-ly provide ROI matching with the cus-tomer's original investment.

—By Ashwani Mishra

percent with greater efficiency and utili-sation of storage.

“There is still a lot of confusion around cloud offerings and we do not think that enterprises would be ready for adoption this year. What we do see happening is the formation of a strategy in the next six to nine months to determine which pieces of the infrastructure they want to migrate on to the cloud,” feels Davis.

A few years ago, enterprises preferred having their storage on Fibre Channel, because it gave higher performance and was robust too. Today, more money is

“Cloud storage from our perspective is not a solution but an approach. We launched our cloud storage software offering designed specifically to enable rapid provisioning and deploy-ment of storage systems without needing new hardware. Cloud-based or virtualised storage consolidates and virtualises disks and controllers to scale capacity and performance and provides enhanced resilience while reducing both capex and opex for ser-vice providers and end-users,” says Venugopal.

“Storage virtualisation, dynamic tiered storage and file and content services would be our three main focus areas

enterprise customers”VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL

Vice President and GM, India, Hitachi Data Systems

GigaOM on HDSHDS' reputation across the major storage-product areas ensures traditional sales, and its strong capabilities in thin provisioning, storage virtualisation and SLA enforcement should make HDS a player in tomorrow’s dynamic, cloud-based data centres. —By Ashwani Mishra



MC has partnered closely with VMware and Cisco on V-Max. Manoj Chugh, President, India and

SAARC, EMC says that organizations are desperate for a new model of IT operation. “Unfortunately, the struc-ture of the industry isn't naturally enabling to that model – meaning, vertically-integrated companies do not have the right technology and technology leaders do not work together to benefit customers.” The intention behind the strategy of closely partnering with VMware and Cisco is to change that with a relationship built around a shared

storage trends that will gain momentum in 2010 are virtualization, de-duplication and the introduc-

tion of energy-efficient features, says Abhilesh Guleria, Country Head, ITPF, NEC India.

In 2010, de-duplication will gain prominence as a fea-ture, rather than a standalone technology, Guleria says. Majority of enterprises still have not deployed de-dupli-cation, but will leverage easier deployments next year as it becomes built into most storage offerings – everything from back-up software, to primary storage, to replication and archiving software. "As more enterprises reap the benefits of de-duplication and the gap it bridges with information management, the primary issue will become management of storage resources," he says. As a result, enterprises will look to vendors to deploy simplified and cross-platform de-duplication management that save time and money.

Guleria notes that in 2009, organizations began to shift from implementing ‘green’ technologies primarily for cost reduction purposes, to a more balanced awareness of also improving the organization’s environmental stand-ing. In 2010, these two drivers will push most enterprise organizations to implement a ‘green’ strategy. IT decision makers are increasingly justifying green IT solutions by more than cost and IT efficiency benefits.

NEC has recently launched NEC Storage E-Series that have iSCSI interface or Fibre channel interface. Initial costs can be minimized and customers can leverage the existing LAN also. In the Fibre channel model, one can have the benefit of high performance with 4Gbps host interface. —By Aditya Kelekar

vision of the next generation in IT called the private cloud. The VCE coalition (Virtual Computing Environment) seeks collaboration in development, services and partner enablement that ‘de-risks’ the infrastructure virtualisation journey of customers to private cloud implementation.

“It’s the power of three. This coalition has been brought together to accelerate the virtualisation of IT infrastruc-ture by combining best-of-breed technology leaders with end-to-end vendor accountability, enabling IT to be con-sumed in a breakthrough way at a lower total cost and increased speed for business benefit,” Chugh says.

This does not mean that products will be less tightly integrated with products of other vendors, Chugh says.

One of the biggest issues the industry has faced over the years is to meet performance requirements at scale, Chugh says. Storage requirements have been increasing exponentially and maintaining service levels is getting difficult. Customers have to spend hours of analysis and review time in managing performance levels and revisit-ing existing deployment. Having enough headroom for the next upgrade arising due to mergers, new users, add-ing new branches, etc. has always been a challenge, usu-ally leading to fresh purchases and eventually higher cost.

—By Aditya Kelekar

EMC Trumps its tie-up with other vendors

“This coalition has been brought together to accelerate the virtualisation of IT infrastructure.”MANOJ CHUGHPresident, India and SAARC, EMC.

De-duplication will find many

takers: NEC

“In 2010, the primary issue will be management of storage

resources.”

ABHILESH GULERIACountry Head, ITPF, NEC India



Future of the Storage Industry. Managing data complexity and complying with government regulations continue to worry CIOs.I WAS asked a question: how is the

storage industry doing? In one word – Great! Information is growing at a terrific pace in organisations which are creating a wealth of knowledge on one hand but causing information management challenges on the other. Storage industry is creating storage networking technologies to store, access, protect, automate, vir-tualise and leverage this information created in existing IT infrastructure or future data centers.

The year 2009 was very challenging with the global economy in a reces-sionary mode. However the future of storage looks great with growth of digital data growth in all walks of life, both personal as well as work-related. For example, social networking sites are creating peta bytes (PB - 1015) of data every week, millions of videos are getting uploaded on You Tube every day, organisations send billions of email every day with mega bytes of attachments, banks transact millions of records every day, public sector is digitizing data at an unprecedented rate and many more industries are joining this digital revolution. Home networking has tremendous growth: a recent survey showed that by 2013,

Virtualisation adoption is picking up speed as organisations are moving from physical to virtual infrastructure. Virtualisation is making hardware a software, you can fly your servers anywhere in the IT infrastructure. It saves a lot of costs in terms of servers, licenses, power, cooling, space, etc., but, if not planned correctly, makes the management and backup complex. Cloud computing was largely a topic for discussion in 2009 but is becoming a reality in 2010 with all the big ven-dors in the fray.

A key requirement for cloud com-puting is cloud storage, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud. Few have started experimenting in this area but the expectation is that in 2010, 90 percent will use private cloud and 10 percent public cloud, while some will use a mix of the two. This mix will change in future as security and data migration concerns disappear. This is the biggest IT wave in the last sixty years; bigger than the previous mainframe, mini, personal computers and network/distributed computing waves.

Solid state disk and SAS disks are causing waves in the market. Infor-mation Life Cycle (ILM) has been

an average home will create 2.2 TB data totaling up to 9 TB, out of which 5 TB will be commercial content. The other industry growing in tandem is security, as whatever data is created needs to be secured from crooks who are eyeing personal and company information as it is the life blood of organizations today.

Let us look at some future storage industry trends. CIOs and IT manag-ers are still playing very cautious as economic recovery is on cards. At the same time, a survey conducted in Jan 2010 by Baird Technology Research indicated that storage was the number one area of IT spend in 2010, followed by virtualisation. Another recent survey from Goldman Sachs in Nov, 2009 showed pent-up demand for storage in 2010 much ahead of PCs and servers. At the same time, organisations have three key concerns apart from security and privacy to manage this informa-tion growth and avoid an implosion: how to keep costs down even as data grows; how to manage complexity in their information and virtual infra-structures; and how to comply effec-tively with internal organisational poli-cies, IT governance and government requirements.

BY INVITATIONP K GUPTA | [email protected] PK GUPTA is Chairman, SNIA South

Asia. He has over 24 years of industry

experience. He specialises in network and

storage management and data backup and

archiving solutions.

Virtualisa-tion adoption is picking up speed as organisations are moving from physi-cal to virtual infrastructure



TIERED storage is one of those terms which people use freely and assume that everyone understands. The basic concept is that you can reduce the cost of storage by assigning your data to different cost tiers of storage depending on the requirements of the data.

However, there are different technologies to address tiered storage. The technology you choose can make a great deal of difference in the value or benefits that can be derived. In fact some implementations of tiered storage

may end up causing more complexity and cost. Here are a number of considerations which may be helpful.

Often I hear people talk about assigning data to tiers of storage based upon the “value” of the data, and they go through a very complicated study to classify the data by “value”. Some companies have spent several years on the classification of data and never finish.

First, I would say that all data is valuable or you shouldn’t be keeping it. Secondly I would separate out

BY INVITATIONHUBERT YOSHIDA |

HUBERT YOSHIDA IS VP

& CTO Hitachi

Data Systems,

and is responsible

for defining the

technical direction

for Hitachi Data

Systems.

talked about a lot in the last six-seven years. Now, with automated tiering of data built into storage boxes to move data between solid state disk, fibre channel disks and SATA disks based on the application requirements, the cost is coming down and the service levels are improving.

Another technology which is really going to help the organisations is data deduplication. As organisations keep multiple copies of the data for long period of time, removing redun-dancy at the sub-block level within the files and across servers and organisation will make for a killer app. It brings with it real savings in terms of power consumption and cooling as it essentially means less storage to take care of. Also, advan-tages such as much faster replica-tion, optimised backup environment and much better manageability. Great technology to bet on.

Other areas to watch are e-discov-ery, as more and more organisations have to comply with regulations and produce digital data for legal cases.

As users are looking for better Return on Investments (ROI) and

lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to manage their ever growing infor-mation infrastructure, interoperability is a crucial factor, specially for hetero-geneous environments. There is a lot of pressure to standardise storage technologies, just as was the case with Internet technologies in 1990s.

There are many benefits to be gained from the development of standards, and from the purchase of products (both hardware and software) that have been built in accordance with standards. Several storage standards are emerging that will help storage administrators man-age data more efficiently now and in future. These are T11, iSCSI, FCIP,

FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ether-net) running on CEE (Converged 10GbE Enhance Ethernet), Storage Management Initiative – Specifica-tion (SMI-S), T11.5 FAIS (Fabric Application Interface Standard), XAM (eXtensible Access Method).

In future FCoE will probably make the most impact. The business ben-efits of FCoE include reduced cost and complexity, better and flexible performance, and reduced power

consumption—all while providing seamless connectivity with existing Ethernet and storage networks.

Some of the new technology inno-vations that we will see in the coming years are:

1.Using low-energy lasers to grow crystals as a storage medium in salt solutions. It has the potential to hold 100 times more data than current systems.

2.Recently, engineers in NC State University, US have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 TB (terabyte) of data – 50 times the capacity of today's best silicon-based chip technologies that use nanostructured Ni-MgO system. In real terms, it can store up to 20 HD DVDs or 250 million pages of text.

3. Next in line is Storage Class Memory (SCM). SCM is a solid-state memory that blurs the boundaries between storage and memory by being low-cost, fast, and non-volatile.

What you are going to see in the next five years will be drastically dif-ferent from what we have seen in the last 10 years. So prepare for your 1 TB USB drive!

New Considerations for Tiered Storage. Adopting the right technology to implement tiered storage is important to get maximum benefits.

BY I NV I TAT I O N T I E RE D S TO R AG E

FU T U RE O F S TO R AG E BY I NV I TAT I O N

primary data from replicated data. Replicas are growing faster than primary data since we cannot afford to stop applications today to do backups, development/test, data transformation, data mining, data distribution, and disas-ter recovery, etc. Rather than disrupt the application server to make these copies, it is simpler to have the storage sys-tems make those copies, especially if we want a consistent copy across a group of related volumes.

These copies do not have to be on the same tier of stor-age as the primary data. With storage virtualisation you can snap them off to lower cost tiers of storage in the same storage system or to lower cost, externally attached, storage systems. There are also technologies to reduce the time and capacity required for making copies such as copy on write and dynamic (thin) provisioning.

Another way to classify a tier is by performance. This makes sense if there is a significant difference in price/performance between the storage tiers. As you can imagine, the differences in performance and cost per GB between different types of storage media can be very significant. There are performance differences in rotation speed and RAID mapping which may make a difference for some types of workloads that are assigned to static tiers, but these differences may not justify the work to dynamically move data up and down tiers of storage on a frequent basis.

Today, movement of data between tiers of storage is done by volumes or files, and moving large volumes and files is a very heavy workload that you might not want to do on a frequent basis. You can start by allocating a volume to a mid tier of storage initially and if it turns out that it needs need higher performance you can promote it to a higher performance tier with storage virtualisation. Storage virtu-alisation forgives you if you happen to make a bad choice with your initial allocation.

Data centres that implement disaster recovery classify applications on the basis of RPO/RTO and assign critical application data to storage systems which have the capability to do distance replication for business continuity. Typically if an application must recover in hours, it uses enterprise storage to do synchronous and/or asynchronous replication. Here again we can use dynamic (thin) provisioning to reduce the time and capacity needed for replication.

With the price and performance differences that we see today between flash drives, FC/SAS disks, and large capacity SATA disks, the benefits of tiered storage have become very compelling. Storage virtualisation makes it easy to copy, move, and replicate data between inter-nal and external tiers of storage without disrupting the applications. Additional services like copy on write, and dynamic (thin) provisioning can decrease the workload needed to do the tiering.

"Moving large volumes and files is a very heavy workload that you might not want to do on a frequent basis"

HIDE TIME | BOOK REVIEW


“The individual has been effectively

replaced by the consumer”

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ranjani Iyer

Mohanty is

a writer and

businesss/

academic editor,

based in Delhi.

She has also

contributed to

the International

Herald Tribune,

the New York

Times, the Wall

Street Journal and

the Mint. Details

are available on

LinkedIn: http://

in.linkedin.com/

pub/ranjani-

iyer-mohanty/

a/51a/48b .

Auth

or: S

teph

en

Gree

n

Good Over Greed. Can maximising returns on capital and caring for posterity go hand in hand? Stephen Green makes us ponder.

view, hoping for our evolution as ascension from matter to spirit, from separateness to union.

Surprisingly, given the recent economic crisis, there are few books on banking and morality. There are however more on business and eth-ics, but only a handful of recent ones and none as popular as Good Value. What gives this book more credibility is Stephen Green himself. He also walks the talk. At the HSBC share-holders meeting last year, in spite of having weathered the financial storm quite well, he said this: "Underlying all these events is a question about the culture and ethics of the industry. It is as if, too often, people had given up asking whether something was the right thing to do, and focused only on whether it was legal and complied with the rules." And he refused his cash bonus in 2008.

At its heart – and it has a big one – this book is a call to action, to rise above and beyond ourselves, as individuals and as business people, think of the greater good, and create a more “responsible vision for life in the global bazaar.” —Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

IN TODAY'S world, ‘responsible financing’ is as much an oxymoron as a ‘godly banker’ – and yet Stephen Green presents us both in his book Good Value: Reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world.

Green is a graduate of Oxford and MIT, an ordained priest in the Church of England, and currently group chair-man of HSBC Holdings. As he readily admits, he views the world through a Christian prism, but it’s a learned, long-term, and liberal one.

Good Value discusses how our society has become more complex in terms of trade, culture, and geopoliti-cal relations, bringing with it more choice. However, the flip side of that is less certainty and more insecu-rity. This has resulted in apathy and cynicism. Green says that with “the commercialization of everything”, “the individual has been effectively replaced by the consumer”. Green acts as our social conscience, remind-ing us that we have a duty beyond ourselves. In a world of marginal-ized peoples, extreme disparities in wealth, and concerns of climate change, he calls for responsible com-merce and tempered consumerism.

“Capitalism for the 21st century needs to discover a fundamentally renewed morality to underpin it.”

For businesses, Green espouses the goal of ‘sustainable value maximiza-tion’, broken down into four points:

Earn the best possible sustainable return on capital. Nurture customer relationships and service.

Show employees how their work contributes to society.

Show the public how the company is contributing to the common good.

The book blends economics, philosophy, and literature to deal with big questions such as ‘What is progress?’, ‘Are we doing something worthwhile?’, and ‘Why should I do anything for posterity?’ Green quotes numerous luminaries to bolster his arguments, including T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, and, most tellingly, Goethe’s Faust. In the chapter titled ‘The Global Bazaar’, Green gives an excellent history of globalization, showing our innate and long-term drive for commerce. He refutes Thomas Friedman’s flat world idea as generalized and simplistic, and pre-fers French philosopher/priest/palae-ontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

ABOUT THEREVIEWER

Can maximising returns on capital and caring for posterity go hand in hand? Stephen Green makes us ponder.

view, hoping for our evolution as ascension from matter to spirit, from

“Capitalism for the 21st century needs to discover a fundamentally

N O H O LDS BARR E D X X X X X X X

Russ Owen, President of Computer Sciences

Corporation’s (CSC) Managed Services Portfolio, in a

discussion with Sana Khan, shares his views on the myths around cloud, the importance

of outsourcing and CSC’s quest for innovation. Excerpts:

ACTIONResearch in

CSC has many firsts to its credit: designing the first automated air cargo system at London’s Heathrow in 1968, the first web-

based tax filing system in Denmark and so on. What motivates the people in CSC? Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) started when the first computers were delivered on flatbed trucks and we wrote the operating system (OS) on the compilers. We gave the industry its name. There was no computer science department in universities before our company was formed.

So, this is the kind of spirit that CSC grew up with before entering the commercial and public sector businesses. We have a heritage of valuing technology and innovation.

CSC has the ‘Leading Edge’ forum for research and we publish technol-ogy trends irrespective of whether those technologies are being produced by us or not. This has been in place for the last 40 years. We predicted a lot



RU S S OWE N N O H O LDS BARR E D

of technology shifts in our ‘Disrup-tive Technologies Report’. We have a lot of people who continuously research these trends.

What are these trends? Are these practical, usable tech-

nologies? Have you been able to pinpoint?Our R&D recognises these trends and the Leading Edge forum, which develops solutions, recommends them internally and to our clients. For example, the consumerisation of cloud. Cloud is more hype than reality. Same is true for “on-demand computing” and other things.

A lot of CIOs don’t understand the cyber threat. A lot of software that the service providers offer can provide a good level-one security. However, security that is based on detecting the signature of the text and other product-based security is not robust enough because a profes-sional hacker does not come in with

a signature so you really need to be thoughtful about being intrinsically secure. If your phone directory is stolen, it would affect your business in a limited way. But if your pricing table is stolen, it would hurt your business a lot. So you make relative judgements about the value of infor-mation and you apply an architec-ture design that recognises the value and moves things at relatively low-risk into the public infrastructure and the high-risk ones in the private infrastructure.

So, in a way, you are sug-gesting the hybrid-cloud

approach?I think we will have the hybrid could environment for the next one decade. I don't think you and I will ever see the day where a CIO will put all of the company’s proprietary information in the public infrastructure. We are working on some projects like ‘Jeri-cho’ with an assumption that some-day the world will have a common identity and a common authentica-tion standard. Some day we will have the ability to detect non-signature based attacks.

To have a sustainable solu-tion, do you also work with

application providers?We have good relationships with some of the top vendors. It often happens that we customise a solu-tion using their products and then trade it back to the vendor as a ‘host-ed offering’ or that we license our products though them. You can see that with SAP and Oracle. They are offering some of our banking and insurance products. We sometimes collaborate in the future evolution of products because we do not want to be in the software business but need the capability. Similarly, in security, we have relationships with some suppliers and there is considerable sharing of information. We value our independence and ensure that we are not a mere channel for sup-pliers' products.

How would you differentiate yourself from some of the

large local Indian companies with a global presence specially as their offerings are cheaper?We had our roots in systems integra-tion so we have always prized our programme management, global enterprise management and securi-ty management skills. Even the tier-one providers in the global industry can’t match our level of expertise and depth. The combination of large scale programme management and service integration and global ser-vice model are really good competi-tive edges.

How did you sustain your pricing and the premium you

charged in the last two years of recession?Our relationships with clients are really like marriages. We are embed-ded in their business. When they were going through the downturn, we were helping them cut operation costs. There was a shift from project-based discretionary spending to reengineering of applications portfo-lios, virtualisation and consolidation, more offshoring etc.

We helped our clients bring down costs and stay competitive. In a down market scenario, we say to our clients that you need to modernise your portfolio and pay for it (the moder-nising) from the savings generated. Now that is a value proposition for the client.

Can you give an example to substantiate?

In a large automotive company, we started with a bid to virtualise their servers, desktops, etc. but as we stepped in we saw that the storage was not being used very efficiently. We gave a proposition to virtualise their storage and drive their capital cost down by half by bringing in efficiencies. The customer was very satisfied with us and we have since collaborated with it in other areas as well.

"I don't think we will see the day when a CIO will put the company’s proprietary information in the public infrastructure"

NAME: Russ Owen

DESIGNATION:President, Managed

Services Sector

ORGANISATION:CSC

PRESENT JOB ROLE:

President of CSC's

Managed Services

Sector with global

responsibilities

PREVIOUS JOB ROLE:

President of CSC's

Global Infrastructure

Services Group

DOSSIER


LI T T LE G IANT S C A R Z O N R E N T

IN THE DRIVER’S

SEATDeploying a home-grown, self-

tested fleet management system helped Carzonrent to drastically

cut down the turnaround time for customer queries BY SANA KHAN

COMPANY DASHBOARD

COMPANY NAME

Carzonrent (India)

Pvt. Ltd.

BUSINESS: Easy Cabs

Hertz Operating

Lease

Hertz Car Rental

LOCATIONS 13 cities

FLEET Total of 5000 cars

(in all 3 businesses)

REVENUE (2009-10) Approx 200 crore

HEAD IT Rajesh Munjal

CEO Rajiv K Vij

Rajesh Munjal Head IT, Carzonrent

In the service industry, pleasing a customer can be tough. Providing a wide range of choice in the services offered has been a tried and tested strategy to woo customers. But how do you appease an impatient customer?

When sales executives at Carzonrent, one of India’s top-most car renting companies, sat with their clients to provide them a car leasing plan tailored to their needs, they often took upto half a day to submit a proposal. Client preferences with regard to the specifics of the cars to be leased required the sales team to feed the data into a program that processed the data and came out with a result. Half a day is enough for a car to roll hundreds of miles or a customer to turn sullen.

The IT team at Carzonrent developed a Fleet Manage-ment System (FMS) solution to get past such delays in processing customer requirements. The in-house devel-oped Leasesoft, is an end-to-end solution to the car leasing


C A R Z O N R E N T L I T T LE G IANT S

for all the departments in the business — from sales to operations to finance. The core team worked for six months to develop and test Lease Soft, now a proprietary solution of Carzonrent.

The process began with identifying the key business challenges including quote generation, service reminders, availability of ser-vices, etc. “It was important that the team had a good overview of the business and understood the exigencies involved. Building a solu-tion for a business like ours was not so easy,” says Munjal.

With the requirements drawn out, the software development team started work. The solution was built using a Microsoft .Net platform. “The initial coding phase took a lot of time as there were a lot of bugs to be fixed.”

“The application is far more stable now. It is running without any problems in all the 68 cities where he have operations. All client acquisition and servicing transactions, fleet management, dealer management etc. are taken care of by Lease Soft,” says Munjal.

The devlopment required an investment of Rs. 28 lakhs, which Munjal estimated would be recov-

ered over a period of two years. “The implementation has been so suc-cessful that we were able to recover the costs in just six months from its deployment,” he claims.

Enjoying the driveKarunesh Arya, COO, Carzonrent is extremely satisfied with the FMS. Arya says that there were many requirements in connection with the commercial vehicles — maintaining the logs regarding the fitness check, getting the road permits, processing the service state-ments, updating the billing status etc. “Lease Soft not only gives this information in real time, it also helps in effective utilisation of infor-mation by all departments. It is user-friendly from all aspects and has considerably reduced the complexities associated with the fleet management business,” says Arya.

Another major benefit of the system is the ease with which a small, core operations team can use it efficiently. It is now possible for just eight people, based in major cities, to carry out operations spread in 68 cities. “The availability of data related to revenue and expenses makes the cost versus spending analysis simple. The con-stant comparison keeps the costs low and makes it less challenging to take corrective actions,” says Munjal.

In future, Munjal has plans of extending some capabilities of the software so that regular customers of the company can generate quotations on their own. “This will not only reduce the manpower required, but the ease and transparency of the process will also go a long way in winning customer confidence,” he says. —[email protected]

business of Carzonrent, that not only given its customers the flex-ibility to instantly choose from a wide spectrum of available vehicles, but also provides a host of leasing options. The FMS has helped in reducing the turnaround time to a customer query by 90 percent and all operations of the company have now been centralised.

Clearing the roadblocksThere were two reason for developing a FMS in Carzonrent Firstly, the leasing business of Carzonrent is expanding rapidly. Using the manual processes caused a lot of wastage of time and thus a web-based system, which could be used across the country and which could be accessible from remote locations, was the need of the hour. Accessing information regarding different permutations and com-binations of available cars is criti-cal to the sales deparment. In the absence of a comprehensive and automated tool for generating multiple options for the clients, the pace of business was slug-gish. The sales team could only revert to the client/s after manu-ally checking the inventories and creating suitable options.

Secondly, without such a system, monitoring the maintenance of cars and checking the servicing obligations was a nightmare. “The nature of the business demands that we keep a constant check on the condition of the vehicles to avoid drastic depreciation of the asset. It was also very important to keep the cost of the infrastruc-ture bare minimum,” says Rajesh Munjal, Head IT, Carzonrent.

Before designing the FMS, Carzonrent was using a FoxPro-based manual system. It worked on Windows platform and client-server architecture. The system, however, could not be accessed from remote/field locations and didn’t allow for consolidation of informa-tion. All factors related to vehicle leasing had to be manually fed into the system which then came out with feasible options for the clients. The manual collation of information meant that the response to the client was slow. The turnaround time was severely impacted even when there was a minor change in the proposals and offers.

A number of readymade fleet management systems were available in the market. “However, none of them were meeting our requirements of generating customer quotations and managing the fleet at the same time,” Munjal points out. The solutions available in the market were either addressing the fleet management or the leasing aspect. The need to integrate the two functions became even more pronounced in the wake of a recessionary economy and a geographically expanding business.

Passing the bendA 12-member team, with Munjal at the helm, took on the challenge of designing an integrated solution which could be a one-stop-shop

THE SOLUTIONS IN THE MARKET WERE EITHER

ADDRESSING THE FLEET MANAGEMENT

OR THE LEASING ASPECT, NOT BOTH.

VIEWPOINT

Avoiding Enterprise Software Vendor Lock-In. Keep the Core

System vendor on its toes!LARGE enterprises rely on software

products. And as everything else in large enterprises, the software prod-ucts are large, complex, cumbersome and nearly unchangeable.

This last attribute is better known as vendor lock-in. Software vendors love vendor lock-in.

Here is a definition borrowed from Wikipedia:

Vendor lock-in, also known as pro-prietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

The problemVendor lock-in exists in most large enterprise verticals like telco, health-care, finance and energy.

Such industries rely heavily on certain computer systems or soft-ware products, usually dubbed Core Systems.

Because most of the business trans-actions, logic and information are stored and processed by these Core

reach a situation where competitors can successfully bid for software upgrades and new functionality without actually switching the Core System.

This is most easily achieved through the Core System’s API interface.

Most Core Systems have extensive Application Programming Interfaces (API), which can be used to exchange data with the Core System or issue commands to it.

So instead of asking for every pos-sible modification or new functional-ity from the Core System vendor, just use it as a processing core — move everything else to other developers, which will need to adhere to the Core System API specifications.

This way you can outsource the development of a lot of applications to other vendors, achieve better response from everyone and always have healthy competition.

Oh, and it will keep the Core Sys-tem vendor on its toes!

Systems, the transition to a differ-ent Core System vendor is extremely costly and time consuming.

So most large enterprise compa-nies simply continue to operate with the same Core System vendor, while they suffer: delays in patch or version delivery poor quality product versions inadequate compliance from the

Core System to their local law and regulations ever increasing maintenance costs.On the other hand, switching to

another Core System vendor will result in probably the same end effect, with the added costs of the switchover.

The solutionSo is there a way to improve your position?

Indeed there is, but with a radical move: there is only one thing that any software vendor reacts to — risk of decrease in earnings from a customer.

To make this risk a reality for the vendor, the customer needs to

ABOUT BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI: Bozidar Spirovski

is an information

security expert with

Information Security

Short Takes

BOZIDAR SPIROVSKI |


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