Making space

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I definitely think there is a gap there for iSCSI in the market. - Anthony Harrison, solutions specialist for server and storage management, Symantec.

With data expanding exponentially across enterprises storage is no longer a poor cousin to the other more high profile IT tasks. NME looks at what is being done across the region when it comes to the effects of SAN and iSCSI.

It is no secret that the proliferation of data being created across IT organisations is exploding in size. Analysts estimate annual growth of data to exceed 60% up to 2011, this sort of exponential growth means that IT managers and vendors increasingly have to look at the question of storage with new eyes.

Coupled with the growth comes the effect that iSCSI and storage area networks (SANs) are having on the storage market. Compliance and regulation together with the importance of safeguarding such large amounts of data has made storage a real priority for the IT professional.

Over the past 12 to 18 months there have been some major changes in the storage field with new technologies coming to the fore and perception changing.

"The explosion of the data is enormous and that is one thing. But in general it does not just concern the storage area. We are seeing movement to a pool of resources where storage and servers as infrastructure resources is combined," says Alfred Steinecker, director of enterprise server and storage software, HP Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

"Like other technologies storage continues to evolve to meet emerging customer needs. In recent months we have witnessed the rise of new technologies that will change the way we look at storage in the future," predicts Khalid Khalil, regional sales manager CEMA for Brocade.

The technologies that Khalil believes to be game changers include the advent of solid state disks (SSD), fibre channel over ethernet (FCoE) and deduplication.

"Solid state technology offers enterprise customers unprecedented I/O performance that rotating hard drives can not match. That opens the door for the deployment of demanding applications that required huge amounts of storage in the past. The new FCoE protocol enables the transport of fibre channel SAN storage over lossless Ethernet which means datacentres will be able to use a lower number of server adapters, fewer cables and fewer switch ports. Finally deduplication simply reduces storage cost by allowing users to remove duplicated data.

Users like GV Rao, general manager of ICT at the United Development Company in Qatar has seen his storage needs dramatically change over the course of the last year. "The business needs are growing and expectations are increasing so from our end things have changed drastically and so we are in the process of expanding our existing storage," says Rao.

"What we are seeing is that people are increasingly questioning the value of fibre channel and they are looking for alternatives and rather than have expensive dedicated storage infrastructure in terms of host bus adaptors and switches and things like that they are looking for different alternatives, so I definitely think there is a gap there for iSCSI in the market," says Anthony Harrison, solutions specialist for server and storage management, Symantec.

Deep impact

In many ways IT as a whole was perceived in the region as very much a haphazard and even wild west like environment. Things were done not according to a specific system or regulation but instead in a ‘just make it work' manner, but the arrival of compliance, regulations and protocols to the Middle East has changed all that.

"Regulation and compliance has definitely had an impact on storage. Legally we now have to keep a lot more information for a set period of time, this means an increased requirement in terms of storage," comments Bassem Aboukaher, regional IT director MENA for Leo Burnett.

Brocade has observed the effect that regulation has had and Khalil has seen enterprises tailor their storage solutions to meet regulatory requirements and to ensure compliance with these mandates. "Regulatory requirements create a need for data storage that tends to drive advancements to ensure compliance," says Khalil.

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