Boom time for storage market in India

Shweta Khanna

NEW DELHI: Couple of years ago storage was all about the storage space in the computer's spindle drives or at the maximum, storing the important data in backup devices such as MO drives or Zip drives. The inflection point in the storage industry has happened and now the storage is all about consolidated storage solutions for the complete enterprise. The buzzwords are NAS, SAN, FAS and Disaster Recovery.

Globally, storage has grown leaps and bounds partially due to the 9/11 incident and also the recent mishaps in the global business community. The WorldCom and Enron fiasco has made the database management the need of the hour. Storage has been maturing significantly in India too, though the inflection point is yet to happen here. Indian storage requirement is still driven by the backup devices such as tape drives and RAIDs, etc.

The enterprise storage is limited to Direct Attached Storage (DAS) but bigger companies, especially the banks, data critical companies, insurance sector and IDCs are considering NAS and SAN solutions.

Gartner estimates that SAN would account for 49 percent and NAS for 32 percent of the storage revenue pie in India by 2005. "SAN and NAS are growing at roughly 80 percent year-on-year," said Anal K Jain, MD (India and SAARC), Network Appliance.



SAN infrastructure supports server clustering or multi-server data access for databases and transaction systems. It is also being used for LAN-free backups. SAN solutions can be deployed starting from data of one TB onwards with 10 servers.

The emerging trends are fueling the storage industry tremendously but the maturity level in India is far fetched. "Indian market is in very early stages and to attain the maturity level it will take at least two years," said David N Nair, Country Manager, Adaptec. Adding on the future trends, the Internet connectivity would be the key to the data transfers according to Nair. "iSCSI is the latest technology, where the data transfer are high and the flexibility in implementing them is also high. The redundancy factor would also be low, thus this might just revolutionize the storage hierarchy."

PK Gupta, Strategic Affairs (Intercontinental), Legato Systems, said that storage requirements would see a sudden bulge once the government passes a ruling on the content management front. E-governance will also bring in a lot of storage requirements. "Earlier the network architecture used to govern the storage design but now it is the other way round. Once the corporate are able to judge the required content management architecture and decide on the future requirements Indian market would become mature," he added.

Compliance issues are also driving the storage requirements. SMSs, e-mails, MMS, etc might be required by the intelligence agencies to be stored. "The heterogeneous storage environments will also be integrated. Latest storage architecture is Enterprise Storage Automation in which any software or hardware update will happen automatically and thus nullifying the redundancy," added Gupta.

The software used for the storage systems plays a key role in enhancing performance and supporting multiple hardware systems. It provides the end-user cost benefits and also provides an information infrastructure for businesses, call centers, service providers and e-businesses to execute, scale and provide better services.

A lot of OEMs are planning to open up their development centers in India, which would result in high revenue growth. "Network Appliance works on a margins of 55 percent-60 percent as the software used are customized and thus the storage solution to a highly profitable business as long as the software is also included. Only box pushing will not yield benefit in this industry," Jain commented about the percent profit margins in India.

The tape based storage market is also growing at a steady pace. Though the tape-based storage solution is also graduating towards automated tape libraries and Ultrium technology, optimized for high capacity and performance with high reliability.



Disaster recovery (DR) is also driving the storage market heavily. Lot of Enterprise Storage Solution (ESS) providers are betting on DR. EMC is betting high on Synchronous Recovery Data Faster (SRDF) in the wings.

Avijit Basu, Marketing Manager (NSSO), HP India, said, "Because of storage consolidation, we see growth in investment on high-end storage infrastructure. These include automated backups and SAN implementations. HP is strong in the top segment storage solutions and the lower segment storage solutions, but has missed out on the middle segment. Now we have the required product offerings and the technical expertise, we just have to try to sustain a viable push in the market through a better profit sharing with our channel partners."

Yogesh Kamat, Sales Manager (Indian Subcontinent), Maxtor, said that the early high-end storage adopters would be the telecoms, IT firms, ITES, banking and financial organizations etc. Vendors are investing heavily on educating the end-users and even users have started thinking seriously about secondary storage. The drivers for the growth are the data-intensive application needed at 24x7 basis. Application like e-mail, ERP, CRM and similar others.

The decreasing cost of storage is also driving the storage market. Also, Network Storage (NAS/SAN) is gaining gradual acceptance vis-a-vis standalone storage. "I feel the Indian market might witness a double-digit growth primarily driven by high capacity drives like DLT, LTO, SDLT etc and automation," added Kamat.

Talking about the storage scenario in India, he felt that in the past two years, awareness regarding IT storage solutions has increased greatly in the country. Corporations understand the importance of data management and have been increasing their IT investments in implementing storage solutions. However, this is in the early to medium term stages and there is a long road ahead for high-end storage solutions.

"Recently we announced a whole new range of drives for the enterprise segment--the MaXLine range and Atlas 15K. MaXLine is the newest generation of ATA drives designed specifically for rapidly emerging enterprise storage applications including near-line, media storage and network storage. The MaXLine family features two critical differentiators: huge capacities up to 320 GB for corporate archiving and media recording; and unique manufacturing and quality for 24/7 operations with mean time to failure rates exceeding one million hours.

By adding a layer of MaXLine drives to archive architectures, companies can instantly recover time-critical data including executive e-mail, transaction data and accounting data that may need to be recovered on demand," added Kamat.



Talking about the future of the storage, he said, "Serial ATA (SATA) will most likely become the standard interface replacing Parallel ATA. The transition will probably occur over the next two years. SATA benefits include faster data rate at 150 MB/sec, bandwidth with point-to-point architecture, reliability as the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) improves accuracy of transmitted data and easier integration with smaller cables and improved routability. The general market interplay scenario is that the lines between desktop and enterprise markets are blurring. As a result, customers will differentiate and evaluate storage products on a number of different dimensions. With that, the application of large, efficient capacity desktop drives into classic enterprise environments is being considered with the key trade-offs being performance, capacity and cost. Interface has become less of a differentiator. In addition, SATA and SAS are being designed to be interchangeable."

The emerging trends are predicting a major contribution from the government's side, especially the e-governance initiatives. The total storage requirement is predicted to be nearly 5,700 terabytes by 2005. With the players continuously witnessing decreasing cost per megabyte the storage solutions might become faster and cheaper.