EMC, the world's leading information infrastructure company, is focused at helping businesses maximise the value of their information assets by implementation of its powerful solutions. Praveen Sahai - Director, Marketing & Corporate Affairs, EMC, shares the company's growth and success in the Enterprise Storage space and the focus in 2008, with CIOL.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Where does EMC position itself in the Enterprise Storage space?

Praveen Sahai: EMC has been instrumental in driving the evolution of the enterprise storage market in India. Since 2003, we have consistently made investments in the Indian market to create awareness for the need to deploy independent information infrastructures. At present, we have a committed investment of USD 500 million by 2010, which is the single largest investment in the storage and information management space by any vendor. EMC has been at the forefront of shifting the market from Direct Attached Storage to Network Attached Storage. Today Networked Storage accounts for 83 percent of the enterprise storage market.

EMC is the world's leading information infrastructure company, focused at helping businesses maximise the value of their information assets by implementation of powerful ILM strategies. We are a best-of-breed player, which has been focused only on storage and information management technologies since our inception in 1979. We have been consistently strengthening our business and technology leadership through 25 plus software company acquisitions and consistent product innovations.

Our leadership in this market space can be gauged by some of our key differentiating aspects :

•  Unlike any other vendor, EMC products are seamlessly interoperable with products from all other vendors. We operate the world's largest interoperability lab.
• With 25+ software acquisitions, we offer the most comprehensive portfolio of systems, software, services and solutions in the information infrastructure space.
• EMC Consulting Services, where EMC experts help companies deploy ILM strategies and realize its benefits, is also one of the key differentiators.

Today, the breadth, quality and diversity of EMC's information infrastructure portfolio is differentiating the company in the IT marketplace and strengthening our financial model. Our strategy, products and solution sets are squarely focused on the areas of technology where CIO's are increasing their spending (Virtualization, Storage, Security, VOIP, enterprise 2.0/SOA, SAAS, Energy/Data Center Efficiency) and we are well poised to leverage the total addressable market opportunity of USD 61 billion.

CIOL: How has the growth been for EMC in India? What are the achievements in 2007 and what are the new initiatives in 2008?

PS: EMC has experienced tremendous growth in the Indian market over the last few years. Our India growth strategy has broadly focused on four key pillars: Grow the information infrastructure market in India; Offer the most robust portfolio of information infrastructure solutions; Expand our sales and marketing infrastructure including expansion of our channel partner network and lastly, Strengthen our R&D presence in the country. We have made consistent progress across all four pillars through multiple investments made in the Indian market and at present have a committed investment of USD500 million by 2010.

For EMC, 2007 was truly a breakout year. We reported our 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth. And, we further organized around our 'One EMC' initiative to interlock and drive more technology and product integrations across our Information Storage, Content Management and Archiving, and RSA Information Security business units, making it much easier for our customers and partners to do business with EMC.

In 2007, we announced the biggest product launch in the industry with the introduction of 25 new hardware and software products in the market. Grouped under four categories of Store, Protect, Optimize and Leverage, they offer customers in India the tools they need to build an intelligent information infrastructure.

During the course of 2007, we strengthened our team and expanded our India operations, while reinforcing EMC's leadership in the Indian market. We also expanded the EMC Academic Alliance (EAA), a program aimed at building a pool of skilled and certified storage professionals in the country to over 75 educational institutes. We hope that our customers would be able to leverage the talent pool to manage their information infrastructure.

EMC was also ranked number 1 vendor in External storage and Network Storage by DQ Top 20 and V&D100 respectively.

In 2008, EMC will focus at expanding its go-to-market strategy to strongly communicate the need for organizations to store, protect, optimize and leverage information and create partnerships that will deliver on the promise. Continue building specialization beyond storage - in areas like content management, security, virtualization, storage resource management both at internal sales team and at most importantly at the partner level, develop innovative customer engagement programs, continue the focus on the education program to build and expand the pool of storage skilled professionals to cater to the burgeoning storage market in India, introduce new business/channel partnerships to expand EMC's presence and last but not the least, increase focus on the channel partner engagement model and further sharpen focus on the channel community.

CIOL: What is it that a CIO looks for to build a powerful information infrastructure in an enterprise?

PS: Some of the key considerations that a CIO should keep in mind while implementing a powerful information infrastructure in an enterprise:

• Classification and policy services, fundamental to ILM and compliance requirements, these services now include policy-based information management capabilities that are essential for automation. These extended services help customers efficiently move information to various tiers of storage as service requirements for specific information change over the information lifecycle.
• Architecture and Consolidation Services now include EMC's best-practice planning methodology to help customers align their new architectures with their business requirements. With extensive expertise in classifying information, aligning applications, and migrating data, EMC helps customers consolidate server and storage environments and accomplish data center relocations with less complexity, risk and cost.
• Storage Management Optimization Services now include the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework combined with EMC's library of storage management best practices. This enhancement helps customers analyze the state of their storage management operations; identify what improvements need to be made; and integrate people, policies and processes to optimize the information infrastructure.
• Information Protection Services now provide comprehensive strategies, processes and plans to meet business continuity objectives including disaster recovery. In addition, EMC has added backup, recovery and archive strategy assessments to help customers mitigate risk to their business.

A successful information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy must be:

-  Business-centric by tying closely with key processes, applications, and initiatives of the business concerned.
-  Policy-based, anchored in enterprise-wide information management policies that span all processes, applications, and resources
- Centrally managed, providing an integrated view into all information assets of the business, both structured and unstructured
- Heterogeneous, encompassing all types of platforms and operating systems
- Aligned with the value of data, matching storage resources to the value of the data to the business at any given point in time

CIOL: 'Flash technology is all set to revolutionize storage'. Elaborate?

PS: Flash Technology is destined to revolutionize storage. For years, the most demanding enterprise applications have been limited by the performance of magnetic disk media. Tier 1 performance in storage arrays has been unable to surpass the physical limitations of hard disk drives. Magnetic disk drive technology no longer defines the performance boundaries for mission critical storage environments.

EMC is the first enterprise storage vendor to integrate flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) into its core product portfolio (EMC Symmetrix DMX- 4). Flash drives are constructed with non-volatile semiconductor NAND Flash memory. These drives form the new "Tier 0" ultra performance storage tier that transcends the limitations previously imposed by magnetic disk drives.

Flash drives also referred to as solid state drives (SSD), contain no moving parts and appear as standard Fibre Channel drives, allow administrators to manage Tier 0 without special processes or tools. Tier 0 is ideally suited for applications with high transaction rates and those requiring the fastest possible retrieval and storage of data, such as currency exchange and electronic trading systems, real-time data feed processing or mainframe transaction processing. Flash drives can deliver single millisecond application response times and up to 30 times more IOPS than traditional 15,000 rpm Fibre Channel drives. Additionally, because there are no mechanical components, Flash drives require up to 98 percent less energy per IOPS than traditional Fibre Channel disk drives.