NEW DELHI: Storage vendors have a lot of homework to do in addressing the
requirements of Indian enterprises. CIOs gathered under the auspices of the ‘Dataquest
CIO Forum’ and raised many pertinent issues related to the storage needs of
the industry. One of the issues was how to integrate the distributed environment
in which storage is commonly deployed in a typical enterprise. Not only that
there are also interoperability and cross-platform issues that need to be
addressed in these enterprises.
Another issue that was raised was that storage options are still far too
expensive for Indian enterprises. Hard disk drives are currently still
cost-effective for rather than state of the art technologies like SAN and NAS
solutions. Enterprises say that they are yet to find solutions from vendors,
which would help them, cut storage costs substantially. CIOs also pointed out
that it was more critical to have business continuity than to go in for
expensive solutions.
Besides, some organizations are still grappling with the issue of how
important storage is for their needs. It was found that by and large
manufacturing companies did not feel the need for storage as much as service
oriented organizations needed. In fact, it was most critical for service
organizations to mange customer database as well as information about market
trends and competitor's records.
Indian enterprises are increasingly getting open to ideas like outsourcing
the management of their database and storage needs. The primary reason for this
kind of mindset change is the signing of SLAs and the need to concentrate on
core competencies.
Panelists included CIOs of Delhi Stock Exchange, Wg Cdr. Avinash Surma;
Fortis Healthcare, Sunil Kapoor; Seagram Manufacturing, Alok Biswas; Daewoo
Motors, Pradeep Gupta; Perfetti Sandeep Parikh, etc among others. HP and Legato
represented the vendor side.