Yarovaya law - is it helpful or harmful? - RCNTEC answers to the questions of the market!

The CEO of RCNTEC, Dennis Neshtoon, responds to the questions.

- Which vendors are developing the equipment for the application of the "Yarovaya law"? Does it match the criteria developed by the Ministry of communications and the operators?

- The main difficulty in the practical application of this law is a very large amount of data (total exabytes - hundreds of petabytes at a point of presence), that has to be stored and processed, as well as a very large data stream.

Choosing from the global suppliers, the challenges of this level can be solved by such companies - cloud providers, as Amazon and Google. They originally created their platforms for storing and processing exabytes of information. But their products cannot be bought for installation in private data processing centers. 

RCNTEC develops and sells scale-out storage appliances named Resilient Cloud Storage (traded in russian market as Polybyte). Resilient Cloud Storage (RCS) is architected to help customers build Petabyte-to-Exabyte scale cloud storage backends within their own datacenters. In Russia, for example, in the nearest future you will be able to purchase the services of one of the best data centers in Russia, based on our equipment - Tier 3 data center DataPro.

Corporate solutions, represented on the market by the famous large vendors, are usually vertically scalable (i.e., they use controllers of high, but limited capacity) and have a theoretical limit of a few or tens of petabytes, which, in practice, due to the limited performance of the controllers, are difficult to load. Horizontally-scalable solutions are usually represented in SDS format (software defined storage), and the practically declared limit of them is also calculated by a few or, maximum, tens of petabytes.

Also there is a number of open source systems (GlusterFS, CEPH), which allow to use normal servers for data storage, but in practice, the creation on their basis of integrated systems in degree of tens and hundreds of petabytes is a difficult task, comparable to the efforts of the manufacturers of data storage systems. Because, firstly, they face some architectural problems, and, secondly, real operating systems require proper design, coordination and orchestration of a huge number of physical hardware, which is usually not done by these open source systems.

- Why do we hear such large numbers in the media? Are all of the hardware requirements, in your opinion, justified?

- All operators, quite fairly, try betting for the maximum. At this point, the scarier numbers we get, the more likely that the application of the law will be postponed. I think the real requirements will be determined within a few more iterations. Solving the problem off the top of the head, we risk very large amounts of data and money, which could be spent for a better use, for example, to create business competition to the global hosting market Amazon and Google, redirecting a part of the money flow into our country.

- How much money will the operators need to execute the law? How much will be spent on technical hardware support?

- Solving the problem responsibly, in order not to lose the data and to normally recover them, the covering of demands of the Big Four (according to the amounts of data their claimed) it would take from 5 to 26 and even up to 156 billion dollars (in total about 200 billion dollars).

If the availability requirements will be slightly lowered, and considering that these amounts will be collected from 2018, and taking into account that the price of the media are falling rapidly due to technology development - these values may be reduced by 4, i.e. from 1.3 to 6 and up to 39 billion dollars (in total about 50 billion). I mentioned above that the real requirements, in my opinion, will be formed according to the results of a few iterations, so in practice the cost is likely to be much lower.

Speaking about support, it usually takes 10-20 percent of the cost of equipment per year. The upgrade will be associated with the organic growth of data volume, since the amount of data we exchange is growing exponentially.

Speaking of the equipment of our company, it allows to use the earlier investments very effectively, because the total amount of data and performance can be increased by disk modules of different generations.

- To what extent due to all these events the storage market in Russia can grow?

 - If the requirements will not be changed, considering the current density of carriers (8-10 TB per hard drive), we are talking in total about the tens of thousands of racks. The growth in specific volume of the carrier and the change in requirements to make them more realistic, these values may be reduced significantly, but there are still thousands or tens of thousands of racks. The market of data storage systems and server production in Russia, due to such needs, can gather speed greatly, comparable with global manufacturers, and thanks to the economy of scale and ability to invest significant amounts in R&D, start competing on the world market very well.

Marina Kriulina,

RCNTEC PR specialist

8 (495) 620-87-87

marina.kriulina@rcntec.com