The amount of data generated by businesses will increase massively
in the next three years. New storage area network offerings will
emerge to cater for smaller firms.
Global production and consumption of computer data is huge, and
continue to grow rapidly, despite the current contractions in the
industry. EMC and the School of Information Management and Systems
at UC-Berkeley estimated in late 2000 that 12 exabytes (12 billion
gigabytes) of data would be generated over the following 30 months.
The rate of growth is increasing, as the demand for digital data
soars through the conversion of non-digital archives and the
introduction of new data applications.
Data storage and management are thus becoming major issues for
businesses, large or small. Organisations will increasingly need an
array of storage facilities and services, including disaster
recovery, Web hosting, content warehousing, digital data exchanges
(eg, for B2B purchase of stock videoclips), datamarts, disc
mirroring, storage sharing, primary data storage, centralised
back-up, archiving, and the like.
In a world where IT budgets are under increasing pressure and IT
expertise is limited and expensive, there are obvious attractions
in a unified, scalable and flexible storage solution, whether
provided in-house or externally by a third-party specialist.
Telecoms carriers see a major revenue opportunity in becoming
providers of data storage and management services.
Storage area networks (Sans) are emerging as the principal data
management solution. They are rapidly taking the lead as the most
likely technology to provide a solution to current data storage and
management issues. Sans are a natural evolution in data management
that physically separate processing from storage by networking
servers, storage units and storage controllers running over an
optical infrastructure under sophisticated data-management
software.
The data-storage requirements of modern high-end servers can be
huge. For example, the recently released Sun Fire 15K
mainframe-class server, intended for networked datacentres, has 106
processors, 500Gbytes of memory and four petabytes (a petabyte is
1,000 terabytes) of storage. Sans are the only practical way of
providing key functions such as back-up and fast data recovery to
such installations. They can be extended from user sites over the
wide area network (Wan) by using dark fibre, ATM, Gigabit Ethernet
or IP, and carriers see the promise of global networked virtual
storage and data-management systems.
Offering Sans will be of interest to carriers in the metropolitan
area network and the major Wan players. Sans are also creating a
new class of business player - storage service providers (SSPs),
which offer users virtual Sans and related data-management services
over telecoms Wans. Many carriers, with their high-capacity optical
networks and facilities centres, could be well placed to exploit
parts of the SSP market. Globally, total Wan San traffic and
service-provision revenues are forecast to reach $19.3bn in 2005 -
an increase of almost 37-fold over revenues in 2000.
While intensive data consumers such as large corporates are the
primary market for Sans, such services also have a place in the SME
market - if the right services are offered at the right price.
Archiving, back-up and disaster recovery are currently done
semi-manually via tape systems or CD/DVD read/write systems by many
SMEs - if at all. Carriers have been attempting to open up the SME
market for some years now, but one of the main difficulties is
cost-justifying the broadband access on which modern IT systems
depend.
Wan Sans require broadband access and will offer users a range of
data-management services that are essential to any company in which
IT is fundamental to the business. Wan Sans can be offered as a
form of application service provision. For example, an SME could be
using a Web-enabled logistics package, whose core database was held
and backed up on a Wan San, which also provided the base for a
disaster-recovery service. Such a package could have a very broad
appeal indeed.
Margaret Hopkins is principal analyst at communications
research group Analysys Research