Web 2.0-01

Credit: ‘CXO Today. Com’ Web Page 'Web 2.0 is Pushing up Storage Demands' Shiv Kumar Kandaswamy, EVP, Zylog Systems spoke to Sonal Desai on how Web 2.0 is changing storage requirements for companies and how they can tackle these challenges. Why is storage important to Web 2.0 companies? Web 2.0 platform has typically been viewed as a venue for users developing wikis and social networking sites with the data stored in the cloud. Yet, the bottom line remains: Web 2.0 based solutions enable users to get extensive functionality from any browser. Web 2.0 companies treat their users as co-developers of the business content which demands massive storage due to the nature of the data. The users of Web 2.0 platforms expect the information availability 24 x 7. . How will Web 2.0 companies leverage it? More enterprise applications will reap the benefits of Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications(RIAs) to drive the innovation and collaboration internally and externally. So the User generated content and the unstructured data (files) are growing much faster than structured data (databases), and capacity-optimized storage for files is growing much faster than traditional filer-based storage. What kind of storage infrastructure do you have in place? And what kind of investments have you made in this space? Currently, we have invested in storage products which are iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel(FC) based. We are looking at expanding the storage model to FC and Serial ATA (SATA) based SAN in order to handle the storage demand and management effectively. What kind of storage systems are you using to simplify the management of multiple petabytes of data at an affordable cost? Compellent's Automated Tiered Storage solution, called Data Progression helps to

address the storage management cost effectively with the tiered FC, and Serial ATA based drives. Do you also use any particular file-based network-attached storage (NAS) system on the market that offers a single management interface while scaling to the multipetabyte level? If yes, please explain. We do use limited number conventional file-based NAS systems currently, however those systems offer very limited management features and performance comparing the SAN environment if we scale them up. Many companies are struggling with file-based growth -- not only how to cope with the sheer growth, but also how to leverage their digital and static media to create additional revenue by delivering online services. Please comment. Yes, handling the file based growth with the traditional NAS systems is a great challenge. So delivering high performance digital experience would be difficult to gain the users base for the content. Can you also comment on the fact that Web 2.0 companies are now open to the concept of tiered storage in order to ensure data mobility? Also explain how this kind of storage architecture works? The Web 2.0 businesses generally encourage the users to generate and share more content with others. The business value goes proportionate to the number of users and the usage of the users' generated content. So the businesses are looking at the tiered storage model which offers cost effective way of implementing SANs with the mix of FC and Serial ATA drives. The data mobility is handled effectively by moving the inactive data off FC drives to SATA. The tiered storage architecture can dynamically classify and move data at the block-level between tiers of storage based on frequency of access. This complete Automated Tiered Storage solution does not require time consuming data classification and the repetitive manual transfer of data between tiers. You can very well define the tiers by Disk drive type, RAID level and rotation speed as well. The architecture can support the business continuity and storage performance by storing all snapshots on lower cost, higher capacity SATA drives, enabling more recovery points that can be kept online longer. State the reason as to why Web 2.0 companies are open to storage solutions that can grow, or be virtualized later, to ensure that old assets are re-used? Again, Web 2.0 businesses heavily rely on the user generated content which are mostly unstructured in nature. The businesses should be able to offer seamless digital experience

to the users irrespective of the time in which the content generated. So its important for us to have the right storage architecture and solution which can optimize the storage environment by providing high performance I/O, tiered data mobility, virtualization, and less complex Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) experience.