BANGALORE, INDIA: The ubiquitous demand for storage and the technology adoption, brought Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to India. Vijay Pradhan, Executive Director, is responsible for developing and implementing plans and strategies that are attuned to achievement of SNIA, India objectives.
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Speaking to CIOL, Vijay Pradhan, talks about his plans regarding SNIA India and the opportunity ahead.
CIOL: Could you provide an overview of SNIA and what is the mission of the association?
Vijay Pradhan: Started in December 1997, SNIA stands for Storage Networking Industry Association. It is a non-profit association that includes vendors of the storage equipment, technology firm associated with storage, the end users that use the technology and the whole other set of people who work in the IT space and are associated with storage.
Globally we have close to around 7000 members from 400 member companies spanning the global storage market. Predominantly SNIA is a global body with headquarters in San Francisco, USA. SNIA India is one chapter of this association like that in Europe, Australia, China, Brazil so on.
SNIA aims to connect the IT industry with end-to-end storage and information management solutions and to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information.
The purpose of SNIA is three fold – one is to disseminate the knowledge to the users of this technology, second to create a talent pool/professional training in storage technology and lastly is to be able to create standards for storage equipment which would benefit the users.
CIOL: You mentioned that SNIA helps in creating the trained storage professionals? Could you elaborate more on this?
VP: We all have heard about networking, security and many other certification and trainings, but never about storage professional. We intend to create, through education and certification, a body of professional in storage technology.
We are garnering further recognition through certification partnerships with major storage vendors, including: Cisco, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Ltd Japan & Hitachi Data Systems, and Network Appliance. Few such certifications are SNIA Qualified Sales Professional (SQSP), SNIA Certified Professional (SCSP), SNIA Certified Systems Engineer (SCSE), SNIA Certified Architect (SCSA), SNIA Certified Storage Networking Expert (SCSN-E).
CIOL: Could you highlight over the various standards that you have introduced for the storage industry?
VP: We would like to drive policies for storage architecture, storage design. We are working on bringing various reference design architectures so that our users can benefit. End users want to implement some applications, but they are not very clear about how to start, proceed and implement. Our templates, policies help them define their environment and understand the best suit for their environment.
The biggest advantage for the end-users is that they get a vendor-neutral approach, a mix of the best option from various vendors. These standards are developed globally. We may carry over a few ideas but these are customized to suit the Indian environment. This is one of our biggest mandates at this point of time. We are also working on Green storage standards. One such standards that we have introduced is Idle Power Metric.
CIOL: When was India chapter launched, and what are the various activities that SNIA India is involved in currently?
VP: The India chapter started about a year ago. This is was an indication that India, as a big global market, is ready with the vendors all willing to participate and work towards this association.
As mentioned earlier, we are primarily focusing on creating awareness and educating more manpower.
In India, we have appointed franchisees in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi that conduct training from SNIA certified trainers, on SNIA course materials. Roughly 200 students have been trained so far. Since this is an in-depth course, our batches range from 8-10. We intend to expand it to other cities like Chennai and Hyderabad.
Storage is a very different business, especially considering a few verticals like BFSI and telecom then storage plays a very vital role. All these require storage to store information and user database. So storage is not a question of choice.