Akhil Kamat, Country Manager, Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India & South Asia talks about prevailing trends in SMB storage and the company’s launch of ‘smarter storage’ solution. By Pupul Dutta
What is the current trend in storage? It is believed that SMBs too are moving within the servers from DAS to SAN. What is your take on that?
As far as the SMB market is concerned, we are noticing a few things like, the performance requirement of an SMB has increased considerably. It is no more about a single application being deployed but multiple applications on a server. As a result of this, now the discussions centre around what kind of performance a vendor company can offer and what kind of software features does vendor company have. Companies are no more bothered by the amount of cash reserve they have and how much is the risk that they can put in. What SMBs today look for before choosing a solution is the kind of software that the vendor is offering on the storage boxes and what kind of performance will they deliver. Secondly, some of the SMBs have already deployed some kind of virtualization and have wasted the benefits of server virtualization. Hence, these companies want to repeat the benefits of virtualization on their storage solution.
Another set of SMBs are the ones, who have already deployed some kind of storage and are facing a different kind of situation around storage software in it.
What kind of software functionality does IBM offer as part of its storage solution?
About three months ago we launched ‘smarter storage’, which is our vision on how our storage technology is going to be or the kind of direction we would give to our customers. We decided that any storage solution that IBM is going to henceforth bring into the market should have few fundamental things. Firstly, it should be efficient in design which means that by the way we design our solutions, a lot of features are put in it so that it helps customers optimise the storage right from day one. It should also help reduce capacity and cost requirement. A classic example that can be given is – IBM has come out with a solution called real time compression wherein it compresses the data as it gets into the device itself. That’s one of our efficiency features. Secondly, the company espouses the fact any storage that we design should be optimised for data, meaning storage should be intelligent enough to know what kind of data is residing in the server and how do I play around with that data.
Thirdly, the set up should be ready for Cloud. This has been our vision for storage. We are now going to take a step further and launch a product at the entry level. The product has recently been launched and has the same pattern and is available for sub Rs 10 lakhs.
What sort of trends are you seeing in converged storage and what is IBM’s offering in this particular space?
In terms of converged storage, customers today do not deploy ‘x’ storage for a certain kind of application and ‘y’ for another kind of requirement. According to a majority of the companies, whatever kind of storage solution they have and whatever their application needs are, should be coupled with their existing infrastructure. All our storage devices today support all kinds of technologies.
The second thing, which comes into play is the the kind of softwares that the vendor puts into storage boxes. We at IBM have made our devices very software feature rich. Lastly, one needs to keep in mind that SMBs do not have great IT skills, so vendor companies need to ensure that things are made simple for them. IBM’s products have a UI, which don’t require trained storage administrator to configure the storage. Its absolutely easy like drag, pull and drop. This makes deployment very simple for SMBs.
IBM is offering Cloud as part of its solution. What is the current scenario in terms of Cloud adoption are apprehensions about security, which is still preventing its adoption among majority companies?
It is true that SMBs have not gone much ahead with Cloud deployment. What they are looking at is what are the applications that can be worked on Cloud and which ones can be retained on the data centre. Basically, compartmentalising what they can put and what they can’t on the Cloud. Secondly, its also in terms of last mile connectivity, the spread of SMBs in terms of remote locations etc. In order to give the last mile connectivity and the necessary SLAs is a problem, therefore, its a mixed bag with some of them wanting to set up their own data centers right under their nose while others want to put tier II applications on Cloud.
SSDs too are a big trend in storage. Are SMBs adopting it? If not, why?
There are two things leading to it. As told earlier, SMBs are deploying Ion intensive applications be it exchange or virtualization. The discussions now are on what kind of performance can be given with these applications. The problem till recently was the cost of SSDs, which was very high and hence, companies were skeptical about its deployment. So, what we did was we came out with a software within our storage devices called ‘port on the wheel’ wherein you can store your data on the SAN lane and only that data which is thought of as one that requires performance is moved to the SSD layer and once the required performance characteristics are met they are traded back. So, what this offers typically is that with smaller amount of SSD you can get 3x% increase in your performance and you just require hardly 10% of SSD infrastructure to get a 300% increase in application performance.
