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The Data Storage market in Asia and globally has evolved drastically over the last twenty odd years. Paul Giroux talks bout how the Data Storage industry started out and what form it has taken today. He talks about underlying technologies, security issues faced....

SDA: You have been with Sun for the past 17 years. Tell us how has the storage industry has grown in that period?

Paul Giroux (PG): When I started in the industry the norm was to have a megabyte drive, the size of a washing machine and slightly heavier. The storage industry has been advancing in leaps and bounds over the last few years especially. Like the density of storage and the various storage devices that you see today have come a long way. What you see now is drastic change in technology.

We used RAID technology for proliferated data services and moved into the RAID controller, in the advent of the high-end storage substitute centres for consolidation and multiple servers. In the advent of having multiple servers and moving to SAN and of course to NAS.

And also the technologies are important and they are all part of this ecosystem. The most important thing that has happened in the last ten years is that data is at the heart of the enterprise and data is taking the forefront in the IT industry..

We are at cross roads where things like RAID 5 and even RAID 6 are not going to be sufficient for the problems going forward. We are entering PUSH technology and we will be seeing newer things evolve. Things like VFF will change the industry. We have to do things differently to survive in data services, in the file system, that is going forward.

In the past data services were mainly controllers, hardware and in the next 18 months you will see a move to the mid-range entry-level commodity hardware, commodity servers running like Solaris and such.

Commodity RAID controllers will change things for the data storage administrator who does things like volume management. We are moving all our data software into Solaris and then open source it. This will again disrupt the market a little bit or a lot. So things are going to change.

SDA: What business issues are driving the demand for storage services today? Storage has been growing at speeds unimaginable, but the underlying technologies haven’t been growing at the same rate. What are the reasons?

PG: There are a lot of technologies in storage. Things like iSCSI, there is the disk technology and the like. To switch perspective we see a contact shift. We started out with Fibre Channel and this year everyone switched to iSCSI—it is the new disk technology. It is less expensive than Fibre Channel so there is a trend moving to that from the current Fibre channel disk.

You’ll still see Fibre channel for some time in enterprise class storage devices. Disks are doubling the capacity about every nine months.

So technology is certainly keeping pace with storage services today.

SDA: The fragmented Storage industry has also seen some wave of consolidation now with Sun being very actively involved in acquiring Storage companies. Do you see the merger and acquisition heat slowing now? If that happens how soon could it happen?

PG: The merger and acquisition heat is not slowing down, because there is still going to be some companies trying to buy certain solution providers and the like. There’s still going to be a drive for consolidation in the storage market because there are so many players in there. But there are only four large vendors in here that can play the kind of research and development balance that are required to draw long-term solutions for customers.

Sun has acquired six to seven companies over the last six or seven years and every one of them were bought for a specific reason to meet the portfolio.

SDA: How has Sun’s attempts at integrating StorageTek’s tape and disk products worked?

PG: We bought StorageTek’s because we needed a storage solution, as we are a systems company. From the time we create data on the application to the time we shared it—that period of time can shift very rapidly because of different policies.

SDA: Recent government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, require businesses to maintain and back up a variety of data they might have otherwise deleted. Have such policies increased growth?

PG: Yes these policies have helped in data growth. But the interesting part is that we saw this coming. We anticipated the fact that everybody is going to at some point store long-term data onto tape so we continued to innovate. We acquired encryption technology that StorageTek had built. This is important to us as it allows us to encrypt every piece of data in the enterprise heterogeneously, so whether it’s a Windows sever, Unix sever, etc. The encryption technology does the encryption just out of the device. This is unique technology as it solves the problem for every one of our customers, because if they loose data they are in deep trouble with the regulatory authorities and the customers.

SDA: What brought about the foresight that helped you see that the market would eventually need Data Storage?

PG: We have a team that studies the market and comes up with “visionary” ideas and looks at what’s going on in the market place. More importantly we have a set of customers who have specific storage needs and that are leading edge. For example when eBay first came online, they had single Sun server with a small amount of storage. They were a leading indicator of what could happen in the world of data requirement. We had to anticipate building that kind of scalability, that kind of robust infrastructure to run eBay. So it’s not that difficult to anticipate as we have all the leading indicators that show you what’s going on in the market.

Once we have all the indicators leading up to this, it wasn’t that difficult to understand that there would be an explosion in the market. There are around 20 million eBay users in the world.

When you have children, look at what they do, how they communicate, they are sending out SMSs. Now theses messages need to be stored. Cell phones is leading indicator for us, they are a big market for us as we supply infrastructure.

And overall that’s where the explosive growth is happening—storage growth on the Internet. It’s very easy to anticipate, we have smart people on the team that anticipate the requirements of people. Look at what form things are taking and you can anticipate what’s to come.

SDA: Can you talk about security issues if any in the data storage arena?

PG: Security is the biggest issue right now in terms of mobile data right now. From a storage perspective, I think there is really no big issue around access; there are many good technologies out there. For example you can firewall and the like.

Once you get in there, if you are not encrypting your data, if you don’t have identity management, then it’s a problem. The two things that we did a few years back was getting technology for identity management. To identify who is actually accessing our data, we are integrating it into our storage platforms as well. So you’ll see that there will be authorised access.

Another issue regarding security is where do we do it? We know that the best place to check the data is when it gets to the device. That way you will be dealing with an entirely heterogeneous environment.

You can do it in the application layer as well, but here it is always going to be dependant on the operating system that supports that and it becomes a lot more complicated so fire walling things in identity management and encrypting all your data is the biggest issue we see today. Thus encryption of data is very important. Like I said I doubt any customer will not encrypt their data. I think over time you will see encryption at the disk layer as well.

SDA: How are Sun’s data storage products different from products launched by peer organisations?

PG: First and foremost thing is we extend a great portion of our R&D budget to test every solution we put together. And I say that because it is very important. None of the technologies in the marketplace today are plug and play. We have to test them end to end; we test everything. The point that differentiates us from others is that we build the best products and we pick the best standards. In this marketplace quality is first and performance second.

SDA: What are the major hurdles (if any) faced in implementing these strategies in the APAC market? How do you overcome it? Tell us what are common strategies used while implementing your products in APAC region?

PG: The APAC market is really not a homogeneous market. In some places there are different requirements. It depends on the industry that is prevalent in that country . In some places, like in Greater China and India cost is everything. They try to drive cost out of everything that they do. So we don’t really have any hurdles as such but it’s a region of great opportunity. There is not really a country that we are not growing. The Telecom industry in Asia—the challenge to mobile operators is that they needs speed of deployment and that is what we are doing and that is what we are good at. We have equal market share or higher when compared to other vendors in the market. We have a very high presence in the APAC region and we are building on that.

SDA: Looking into the future, what technological advances do you visualise in the data storage domain over the next 10 decade? How do you see Sun evolving in this area of focus?

PG: We have a product called Honeycomb, which handles unstructured and structures data very efficiently with search engine ability right from the source device. If you look to the future, we know for example RAID controllers will be totally commoditised.. They are wholly custom A 6. To do a custom A6 is a very expensive proposition as it takes a long time to get to market and any failure or any bug means that you have to go back and restart. That’s not the best way to approach the problem. We know that in the future we won’t need RAID controllers.

The economics of it is fully changing. Data growth is at 70 per cent and cost is at 35 per cent. We think we can disrupt this from that chain by using commodity parts to build the next generation storage devices and double the capacity, so that they can keep up with the problem that is data storage today.

We have roadmaps on products that we are building. We are always watching the market. With regards toMemory RAM, that’s an opportunity in the future that’s going to be disruptive technology going forward as it gives you long-term archive storage. There are lost of technologies being worked on in the storage business.

SDA: What kind of feedback are you getting from the APAC market so far?

PG: It really depends from country to country. The entire market has grown 19 to 20 per cent. Sun however, grew at 26 per cent. We are taking market share and are growing really quickly.

SDA: Which three top metrics do Sun Microsystems use when evaluating data storage product?

PG: There are three metrics—first is quality, second is quality and third is quality. Quality is everything. If there is no quality you’ll loose the customer forever. Data is at the heart of the enterprise and customers trust your products. They put their data in your hands; it has to be the most robust. Apart from that I look at performance and features. Like to have robust data services. We also look at manufacturing ability to drive cost out of the product. All theses things play into it. And of course, how we can integrate the product into any software.