NETWORK STORAGE

Building Efficiency

Storage.is.one.of.the.few.fast.growing.and. profitable.segments.in.the.ICT.industry..

Datah which was generated in a few kilobytes earlierh is now being generated both by enterprises and consumers and is having huge growth. It is moving at a speed of terabyteh petabyteh exabyte andh by the next 5 yearsh it is likely to accelerate to zettabyte or yottabyte. The data delugeh accounting from collaborative networksh systems of recordsh personal devices imobilityh and audio and video has created an acute need for backuph restoreh and disaster recovery. Hence storage vendors have no dearth of opportunities for growth. Storage is one of the few fast growing and profitable segments in the ICT industry. The market size of storage in India in fiscal 201112 is pegged at 1H645 crore compared to the previous fiscalh which stood at 1H587 crore. Despite the huge opportunitiesh storage market is yet to reap the benefits to the fullest in India and the market had a flat growth rate of 3.7% in FY12.

Trends

VirtualizationH web 2.0H and NRPICRM adoption are the key trends in the storage market. Productivity software like MS NxchangeH OracleH SQL will further increase demand for storage. Growing demand for surveillance data is another big demand creator for storage. Data storage products and solutions allow organizations to retain and manage rapidly growing multifaceted volumes of digital information and address critical client requirements for information retention and archivingH data de-duplicationH availability and virtualizationH security and complianceH etc.

Industry consensus is that trends like storage efficiencyH consolidation to convergence and transparency will pick up. There

is a greater focus on storage efficiency technologies such as storage virtualizationH dynamic or thin provisioningH dynamic tiering and archiving are picking up immensely. Consolidation will give way to convergence. Over the past few yearsH IT has focused on consolidation and much of the low-hanging fruit has now been consolidated. In order to gain further cost savingsH the focus will be on convergence of serverH storageH networksH and applications.

Cloud storage is one of the trends. As more cloud based storage solutions are being availableH the foreseeable challenges to be faced by both vendors and customers are: Phether enterprise customers have adequate broadband infrastructure for cloud based storage applications; factors that justify the need to move data to cloud storage; data security measures; and the extra cost needed after moving into cloud. Applications and infrastructure will be more transparent with each other in order to facilitate convergence through open interfaces like APIsH clientIprovidersH and plugins.

Two key areas that would be critical to the growth of big enterprises as well as SMN businesses are cloud computing and moving into the era of big data. And all storage vendors are focusing on these. Moving forward most organizations will use a combination of internal and external

Growth Drivers

Network attached storage devices (NAS) is gaining significant importance because users not only want a centralized way to store multimedia and other dataH but they also want easy ways to shareH streamH and remotely access that content. NAS manufacturers see huge opportunities in the storage marketH the reason being the rising awareness about data security among SMB customers. The key verticals driving the Indian NAS market would be: Nngineering designH high performance computingH offshore developmentH web servicesH digital animation.

In the recent yearsH big data has quadrupled the storage needs. There is a high growth from unstructured dataH replicated dataH and structured data. Organizations are accelerating storage investment to catch up with the fast growing capacity and performance requirementsH and using advanced technologies to improve storage efficiency and address the complexity issues.

Market Outlook

In comparison to the developed marketsH India is relatively small. But there are massive opportunities as there are no legacy investments and the opportunity to introduce newH innovative technologies are huge. Storage is going to be a strategic investment priority for mid-sized companies.

Large and small enterprises are facing the biggest hardware infrastructure challenge due to the data growth. Companies are relying too heavily on hardware upgrades to support continued data growth. Achieving the high performance required to support emerging applications while at the same time scaling industry-standard protocols are the key challenges the organizations are facing today. Storage investment can be best optimized by managing information and data based on its lifecycle—creationH useH referenceH preservationH and deletion. In order to ensure data availabilityH data securityH ongoing business continuityH the enterprises need to build mechanisms of data backup and recovery that ensures seamless operation even in the event of system failures or disasters.

malinin@cybermedia.co.in