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Pratima Harigunani
The data storage space has undergone radical shift in the last five decades – be it in industry, technology, or customer experience. Data storage surely has a lot more in store. And what better way to sniff out the details from the man at helm of Western Digital India, a leading player in the data storage and hard drive industry.
As director of sales, India and South Asia for Western Digital, Sharad Srivastava is selling hard and with a drive, be it desktop or notebook computers, mobile or handheld devices, corporate networks or home entertainment applications.
The hard drive celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. The first drive came in 1956 as a 5 MB piece with 50 platters of 24 inch each. It cost $50,000 (Rs. 2.3 crore in today’s monetary terms) and required four people to lift it.
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hard drives, we have an 8gm piece that can store 4-5 GB and costs less than $200. And still, the journey seems to just have started. From the hefty discs to circuitous tapes to the advent of hard drives, the data storage story has progressed very interestingly. Density has increased, space has shrunk, access has accelerated, applications multiplied and costs have been whipped down. The hard drive has not just survived, or just grown; but has evolved along the way. In short, it has come of age. Is it the right time for grooming a successor to the hard disk?
No” is the answer the question elicits from Sharad Srivastava. “There is still a long way to go. At least for the next decade, I don’t see the drive going away, there’s a lot more scope here,” he adds for effect.
A lot, however, has changed over the course of time. Among the many candles on the birthday cake this time, is the transition towards network data storage. The industry has moved ahead from DAS (direct attached storage) to NAS (network attached storage) and SAN (storage area network).
Srivastava feels that NAS and SAN are here for the long run. He denies concerns over complexity, costs and server requirements on the issue of NAS and SAN, “Both are going to stay depending upon requirements of particular customer enterprises. SAN is gaining greater traction in the market.”
Look at the dynamic market reversal, he accentuates. “According to IDC, in 2002, DAS commanded 75 per cent of enterprise pie. In a span of four years, DAS has come down to 25 per cent while NAS stands at 75 per cent. There are advantages of easy access, manageability, costs, expansion without disturbances and ability of virtualization.”
Srivastava’s favorite piece of the cake in the emerging technology space is “perpendicular technology”. This data storage technology uses optimization of space by recording bits in longitudinal fashion. He finds the technology fascinating because it deals well with the constraint of number of platters and the area of small form factors. “This technology is capable of stretching the erstwhile super-paramagnetic limit by 10 fold to around 1500 GB per square.”
He is hard-pressed to pick the ‘watch-out’ set in data storage space. Take for instance, the emergence of ‘holographic technology’, a technology that uses 3D arrangement instead of sequential, thereby promising breakthroughs in data storage density and access speeds. While the technology is already sending ripples across various industry turfs, Srivastava does not seem to be much impressed. “I am not much of an expert to comment on this technology. But I guess it is still at the laboratory level and hasn’t made much headway in commercial viability so far.”
© CyberMedia News
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