Redesigning Strategy

Over the past few years, large enterprises have invested
heavily in storage resulting in the creation of isolated pools or 'islands'
of storage. They are now looking at consolidation that would allow them better
utilization of capacities, better performance, and ease of management.

Storage has been one premise of IT where the Indian
enterprises are willing to and also spend liberally, but not copiously yet.
According to V&D100 estimates the total network storage market in India in
FY 2004—05 stood at Rs 430 crore. SAN and NAS contributed Rs 270 crore and Rs
100 crore respectively to the total. Standalone shipment of network storage
software was in the range of Rs 55 crore.

What's Your Choice?

FC-SANs constitute more than two-thirds of the overall SAN market in India.
While FC SANs thrive, the emergence of IP SANs tilted the scales. IP SAN
deployments across enterprises including SMBs accelerated the move away from DAS-the
traditional storage at enterprises. As IP-SANs use the iSCSI protocol, they
offer SAN like functionality over industry standard TCP/IP and Ethernet. By
carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI facilitated data transfer over
intranet. Therefore, iSCSI was amongst the key technologies that helped SAN
deployments to filter to small and medium enterprises.

There was a kind of stagnated spending in the high-end market
segment as most like the BFSI, Telco, and ITeS have already heavily invested in
the scalable storage solutions. More and more spending has been from the
mid-tier, which could again be demarcated as upper and lower mid-tiers.

Vaidyanathan R Iyer, country manager, Intransa, India says,
"IP-SAN is increasingly being preferred as a storage solution of choice by
wide variety of customers across industry verticals including manufacturing,
telecom, media, BPO, software development, etc." Some of Intransa's IP
SAN customers include Spice Telecom, HCL Technologies, Wipro Spectramind,
L&T, Grasim Industries, Quintilles, Rediff, Sunpharma, etc.

IP-SAN finds favor with telecom companies for disaster
recovery and nearline-data protection. "IP-SANs are entering a new phase
and have now become a serious alternative to FC-SANs," said Tony Asaro,
senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

SMBs Scouting Actively

SMBs have been actively spending-though conservatively-which according to an
AMI-Partners report, was at Rs 116 crore for DAS and Rs 74 crore on network
storage. Most vendors have revised their products and strategies and customized
them to the burgeoning demands and needs of the Indian SMB market.

For Tom Zack, VP, marketing and operations, Asia-Pacific,
Hitachi Data Systems, the middle tier market is growing at 40% and they have to
address the lower mid tier market through products that are low in cost with
high availability and rich functionality. Also for the first time in Sun and HP's
product history-they are selling HDS' mid-tier storage solution.

Another important aspect was the realization of CRM and its
implementation and increased spending on applications like ERP. Increased levels
of security awareness, and need to create data back up and recovery solutions
gave an impetus to storage. Rahul singh, marketing manager, StorageWorks
Division, HP India opines, "There is a visible trend towards network
attached storage and automated back up in SME. SMEs, in the absence of
full-fledged IT departments, are looking at ease of operations where, for
instance, backups are auto-scheduled and continue to happen in the background,
maybe over the weekend. A sea change from the current-day scenario where people
may be running around all night with tape cartridges."

Evolving Market

Gone are the days when vendors pushed vanilla storage boxes, today the need
is for specialized storage solutions. Earlier server vendors like HP and IBM
used to sell storage boxes with their key offerings. Globally, market players
realized the need for specialization and strategy change. As a result, EMC, the
early bird, led the pack globally with NetApp and HDS also faring pretty well.
However, the earlier stalwarts HP, IBM, and Sun did not really strike gold.

As the storage industry in India is shifting from DAS model
to a networked storage model, it is increasing the focus on software and
services integrated in the solutions. EMC is a successful study where it changed
its market strategy from 70% hardware and 30% software and services in FY 2003—04
to 47% hardware and 53% software in FY 2004—05. NetApp also benefited from its
two SIs-Wipro and Apara.

Veritas picked up Rs 50 crore-43% of the market-through
its various solutions for e-mail archiving, clustering, backup etc.

Storage solution providers today are taking the
application-oriented approach towards IT infrastructure. This approach is more
in line with the business processes of the organizations and ensures that the
right solution is put forth for an enterprise. According to Shuja Mirza,
technical consultant-India, Brocade Communications Systems, "IT
infrastructures today are evolving as competitive tools, rather than just
processing power for batch jobs or electronic storage media pools. This approach
aligns the IT plans with the business objectives of the organization."

IT departments are now deploying low cost, cost-effective ATA
disk arrays as a staging area, either as a front-end to a tape library or as a
stand-alone appliance on the network.

This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts
and effectively eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables the backup
servers and the associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further
cost savings. In a similar vein, the StorControl facilitates the backup of
desktop/laptop user data, addressing one of the most significant challenges for
today's enterprise IT organizations.

Majority of Indian Companies are looking at building DR
capabilities by utilizing their existing Ethernet infrastructure and already
available IP skill sets of their IT technicians.

Minu Sirsalewala