Dell to leverage on India's cost-sensitivity

Radhika Bhuyan

NEW DELHI: The world is witnessing a rapid proliferation of data on one hand and a proportionate decline in disk storage costs on the other. Companies can afford them now than they used to. But India's deployment of storage solutions is still lagging behind other countries within the Asia Pacific region.

Dell Computers, director (Storage) Simon Penny, attributes the lag to infrastructure in India and also the very cost sensitive nature of the local market. But Dell sees the cost sensitive nature of India a big advantage as the company has always been targeting cost sensitive markets. SAN implementation will accelerate rapidly once it starts in India because SAN solutions are 60 per cent cheaper to manage than traditional older architectures. Besides the payback period for the initial capital investment on a SAN is as short as six months.

Dell sees India as the next big boom region after China. Simon believes infrastructure in India is slowly improving which will make it conducive to storage growth in the next few years. Over the next couple of years India is expected to deploy more modern storage architectures like SAN and NAS and reduce their management costs to a great extent.

There are many factors driving the growth in storage requirements in Asia Pacific and likewise in India in recent times. First, many organizations especially after September 11 are starting to realize that they need to replicate their data at an alternative site in order to guarantee business continuance. This doubled the storage capacity requirement. Secondly, compliance to international standards brought about by WTO would necessitate organizations to streamline their processes and thereby increase storage capacity requirements in India.

"China has just entered the WTO and many companies have begun to operate on a world stage. Most processes are being streamlined into ERP solutions which are notorious consumers of storage capacity." said Simon.

SANs require more planning and thought prior to implementation than did older storage architectures that are still prevalent in India. Also with industry transition to networked storage there do remain associated technical and business challenges for which organizations need to assess their capability. "This is one of the reasons that Dell has increased it's portfolio of service offerings in India which coincides with the Dell/EMC launch. Dell is combining their consulting services with the resources of their world wide Advanced Systems Group to deploy these solutions. Where required, Dell works closely with EMC services and leverages on their high-end solutions", said Simon.

A key SAN design issue is whether to deploy SAN in a homogenous or heterogeneous operating environment and on what OS. "Dell will address the Unix based heterogeneous SAN which comprises 50per cent of the SAN market in Asia Pacific and will be approx. the same for India." concluded Simon. IDC predicts that the SAN market would be US $ 81m and SCSI based storage would reach $ 141.6 million by year 2005.