How to ride the waves of the Storage Tsunami

Can you remember, when was the last time you cleaned out your email inbox? Archiving important old emails or deleting not important ones was a common phenomenon a few years back. It all changed in 2004 with the introduction of Gmail. Consumer expectations changed radically. Other email service providers like Yahoo and MSN also started offering higher capacity mailboxes. The broadband service providers began offering multiple free email accounts to their subscribers, including 2 GB of storage space per mailbox. It did not take long for consumers to take free email with content sharing and practically limitless storage for granted.

With the introduction of smarter mobile devices and richer webmail clients, the number of subscribers using the internet and IMAP to access, share and store their content increased immensely. However, this rich email experience comes with the baggage of additional storage.

Hence, it is business critical for service providers to support all the content being shared and stored or they risk losing subscribers. The service providers are facing one of the biggest challenge ever - the Storage Tsunami.

It is imperative for the service providers to find low-cost storage solutions for their email services if they want their email business to remain viable and profitable. However, the cost of current storage solutions used by most commercially available email products is simply too high for service providers. Adopting such storage solution jeopardises their chances of offering a competitive and cost-effective email service to their consumers.

With the growing adoption of smartphones and tablets the consumers are looking forward to a much richer content experience. With service providers offering more data-intensive services, subscribers’ demand for content sharing and storage will continue to grow. In face of the impending Storage Tsunami, service providers can try to fight the surge by imposing storage limits on their subscribers. However, this will inevitably result in a huge churn. Hence the more viable option is to embrace new stateless storage solutions for email and content that will allow them to meet the growing demand in a very cost-effective manner, while also retaining the quality and reliability of the service.

Webmail and mobile access: the new norm

The email access profile is evolving from POP3 to webmail/IMAP. Currently about 45% of users access their messages via webmail/IMAP as compared to about 55% using POP3.

However, this access trend is forecast to continue to shift rapidly towards webmail. Access to email using mobile devices via IMAP is also growing really fast.

Richer multimedia content: better quality - greater size

There is a huge increase in the average message size over the past couple of years. High-resolution still photograph/video cameras have helped push the average size of email attachments from a few kilobytes to several megabytes. This places an increasing burden on the service provider to support all the content being shared and stored. With converged mailboxes, unified communication is likely to bring even more multimedia content to the mailbox, aggravating the problem.

Bigger mailbox: unlimited storage options

Most email clients supporting the POP3 protocol have default settings that either delete emails from the server immediately after downloading them to the client or delete the emails after a few days. This minimises the long-term storage needs of a mailbox for the service provider.

However, with increasing IMAP and webmail access from a variety of devices, subscribers expect their messages to be available on the server for longer periods of time. Today, subscribers have started to treat their mailboxes as ‘searchable’ storage in the cloud.

Consumer expectations: a radical shift

Consumers are expecting unlimited storage options. Taglines like “Never delete your email again” are becoming the norm. The average mailbox size has increased many times in the past couple of years. This trend is going to result in service providers facing the likely prospect of having to store petabytes of data.

Impact on service providers

In order to meet the consumer expectations, service providers are being compelled to offer larger mailboxes and some are even offering unlimited mailbox storage space. With the increased use of mailboxes the service providers are facing the inevitable side effects:

• Higher storage costs due to high storage demands;
• Rise in OPEX due to the increase in hardware footprint; ·
• More complicated data protection schemes; ·
• Increased recovery time after failure; ·
• Performance issues that existing email systems are not equipped to tackle;
• In some cases, the mailstore architecture requires mailbox rebalancing when the load on a particular mailstore server exceeds capacity, adding to operating costs; 
• Adopting larger-capacity drives is not an effective solution as larger drives cannot keep up with the input/output operations per second (IOPS) demand under load.

Email platform: rise in costs

A significant portion of the service provider’s CAPEX/OPEX budget for email systems is allocated towards storage hardware, maintenance and services. The typical service provider spends about 32% of their IT budget on storage. An additional 17% of their budget is spent on software, including licences and maintenance.

Storage requirement: huge increment

Increased usage of webmail and IMAP access for email, coupled with larger multimedia content per message, is directly impacting the storage requirement of the service providers. Current storage cost structures do not allow service providers to cope with the situation and remain competitive. The storage problem is about to take a turn for the worse and it can dampen business prospects of a lot of service providers.

Conclusion

The fact remains that the service providers cannot but embrace the trend towards limitless storage as it is not going away. It is just another additional data tsunami that needs to be accounted for and dealt with. Service providers should look for solutions that will enable the new paradigm and in a cost-effective way. Even with limitless storage, the total cost of ownership for messaging products can ultimately be low and service providers can maintain ownership of a service whose future remains bright - the essential and effective email.

*By John Giere, Senior Vice President, Products and Marketing, Openwave Systems