Growth drivers of unstructured data:

*Video, YouTube, IPTV data created and distributed by individuals.

*Application rich mobile phones, which are capable of delivering, transmitting and receiving very high resolution video and audio content.

*Data protection and management: As a user we would like to have even smaller gadgets to be fully interoperable with applications such as SAP, supply chain etc.

This create lot of challenges in what we call native storage, i.e, at each point of consolidation you require a storage point, because you don't want to lose an important data during transmission.

Citizen connectivity is directly correlated to national productivity. Today mere connectivity is not enough. So there is a need for 3G network, and appliances to cater to that need as fast as they can.

However, these are not unique to India, but given its current state, India does have a lot of promise to participate in this trend.

Digitization move by emerging countries in spaces including healthcare, UID are not unique to India.

CIOL: What are the unique trends that you see in India?

PD: Some of the trends are:
Separation of data centre from storage: Longer term, that is designable. We see a lot of efficiency, because if you can virtualize storage, just like today, it is easy to visualize virtualization of server because it is a network that sits in a data centre and within enterprise or outside.

Virtualization: With regards to virtualization, India is taking the advantage of this technology. However, virtualization getting deployed more within enterprise LAN segment and not yet heavily at the WAN segment. The reason is that the infrastructure needs to catch up before we do that.

Storage and IO virtualization: However, this require WAN infrastructure presence; and will be tied more closely as to how cloud computing will grow in the longer run. In Indian market, cloud computing will not succeed until the infrastructure catches up. Worldwide we have seen that where infrastructure is strong cloud is growing rather quickly.

Another aspect in cloud computing is to take care of intellectual property, the protection concerned as well as some of the complaint aspects, where virtually it won't be possible to broadcast a data to two separate locations, in case one of the location is down.

These issues will slow down the growth in cloud computing space.

CIOL: How important is India with regards to LSI's two-pillar (networking and storage) focus?

PD: From a consumption standpoint, India as well as APAC are very important. Market trends are more pervasive in a different manner in Asia Pacific. However, we continue to see strength in the US and European market in a more advanced manner from a data centre standpoint.

From a connectivity and storage standpoint, we feel that India is at the beginning stages of a longer term sustaining demand to place more and more data centres within the country. However, India lags when it comes to digitization of record, when compared to the rest of the world.

If you look at the government sector, at some point we will have to go ahead and digitize healthcare related data, variety of registrations (property, real estate, motor vehicle), and the UID initiation of the Central Government.

All of these require tremendous amount of investment in infrastructure and when you invest in infrastructure, then those spikes become larger and larger for people to access information. You need to store those information somewhere.

So combination of trends within cloud, virtualization and networking will essentially see a convergence within Indian context.