Cloud will rule storage market: NetApp

According to an IDC report, storage software market that includes data protection and recovery, archiving (including email archiving), storage replication, storage management, storage device management, storage infrastructure and file system saw a growth of 5.2 per cent over the same quarter last year.

NetApp, a 17-year-old player in the storage segment that stands at fourth position in the overall storage market, recently opened a new facility in Bangalore, indicating the emerging role of storage in the country. Rajesh Janey, President-Sales, NetApp (India and SAARC), talks to CIOL's Akanksha Prasad about the storage market and company's strategy around that.

CIOL: Storage market has performed decently in the market in comparison to other technology segments. What factors have been driving the market.

Rajesh Janey: Storage and backup of information are crucial components in every company. The market conditions forced the companies to look at more efficient ways for greater power and space savings like server virtualization, storage efficiency and fiber Ethernet etc.

And we are not isolated from that. Our products like NetApp V-series, storage and data management products for Vmware, have seen a lot of traction among the customers.

CIOL: What product /technology is expected to gain more demand in next two-three years from now? And how has NetApp been in sync with this?

RJ: We see a lot of momentum in 10G Ethernet and cloud computing. In the next two-three years, it would become the default for all the network infrastructure. We offer unified storage and network infrastructure which have Ethernet-based storage systems over 10Gb and 1Gb Ethernet fabrics.

In the field of cloud computing, NetApp will play a big role as a Cloud enabler. It recently announced the integration and certification of its storage platforms with VMware vSphere 4 , the operating system for building the internal cloud. We have acquired many of customers who have adopted the cloud computing through our services.

CIOL: With the expected acquisition of Data Domain, Netapp seems to be eyeing at a completing its de-duplication portfolio. What opportunity of de-duplication do you see in the market?

RJ: Apart from Ethernet and Cloud, Deduplication technology has also been in buzz for almost a year now. According to an IDC report, 'out of the total information available only 25 per cent of the it is unique'. This means with the help of de-duplication we can increase the storage space by more than 50 per cent. Companies are slowly realizing its importance. We offer free licence of de-duplication to our customers and track the product demand through the deployment of these licenses. IN past one year, there has been substantial increase in the deployment. In one year around 217 customers deployed the licence in their systems.

This perhaps is not the right time to talk about Data Domain. Everyone knows Netapp is very strong in primary storage, while data domain in secondary storage.

CIOL: You recently opened an innovation center in Bangalore, which you claim to be the largest center located outside the US. Could you tell us something about the center and how different it is from a test center?

RJ: NetApp innovation center is a pool of services, where our customers can experience and calibrate the performance of the technology. Here customers can experience their own application, they can simulate, as mentioned before the cloud computing, Ethernet-based network, backup virtualization and run benchmarks in a data management suite of application.

It is very different from test center. A typical test lab has a close-loop mechanism, with a strength of around 25-50 engineers. While NIC is a pool of various centers, run by a team of around 1000 engineers. This is a unique 390 rack data center with a remote console. It provides an efficiency of 1.55 as compared to the industry mark of 2.4. It helps in bringing down the data center costs by around 30 per cent.

CIOL: Netapp has hugely invested in building up this innovation center. How is this reaping benefits?

RJ: All our attempt boils down to customer acquisition and revenues, so does the setting up of NIC. We had started the pilot phase of NIC almost 3-4 months back, and we have already got around 20 new customers.

About 90 per cent of the customers who have visited the center have decided to leverage this facility. And going by this speed, we would gain substantial market share. NIC is a new concept but it is helping both the channels and the customers, as it also helps in shortening the sales-cycle.