The Decade of Storage?

First

it was LAN. Then WAN. Now it could be storage area networks, or

simply SAN. The concept of network storage, existing from the punch

card days, is just beginning to crystallize into a mature technology.

Relevance

to India?



"Good sense prevails in all markets. Indian markets will follow
the same trend of SAN acceptance," explains Khan. "The

only difference in near future would be that the quantum of shift

will be more evolutionary than revolutionary, and will be commensurate

with Indian spending in other markets," he adds. But actually,

the market's awareness and data dependence is so critical that India

has been showing signs of a matured market in the storage segment.

"While the server connect-rate to backup in the US is 83%,

and that of APAC is 33%, India has an amazing 70%," points

out Princy. The market for storage itself is growing at a CAGR of

above 30% in the network backup devices segment and industry sources

estimate the Indian storage market to touch $60 million for 1999-2000.

The

growth engine for the network storage market are areas such as banking,

finance and data centers, where the data itself is the life line

for the organization. That is the reason why National Securities

Depositories Ltd and the Bombay Stock exchange (BSE) have already

gone in for SAN implementation, while at least half a dozen companies

in India are in the process of implementing SAN. There are several

other companies that are evaluating the benefits of implementing

SAN for competitive advantage. For instance, the Corporate IT department

at Crompton Greaves, which manages its four strategic business units

(SBU), namely, Industrial, Power, Consumer and Digital SBUs. The

company presently has a decentralized data accumulation and a central

processing of all the data at the Corporate IT center in Mumbai.

The data gathered across 70 locations in India in functions such

as sales, accounting and IT travels in physical or electronic format

to the Corporate IT department where processing and backup is undertaken.

Says M Topiwalla, Senior EDP Manager, Crompton Greaves, "Sooner

or later, we have to go in for network storage. But we are in the

midst of implementing SAP across different divisions and SAN will

be undertaken only after that goes live." The company is evaluating

the benefits of implementing SAN across the enterprise.

Justifying

costs



On the other hand, there are those who are still looking at the
cost-justification factor. Typically a SAN implementation can cost

anywhere between a few lakh to a few crore, depending on the capacity

of data, class of servers and their placement on a network, not

to mention the business application. "We are looking at SAN

very closely from a worldwide perspective. Being consultants, we

are also configuring SAN for several companies in India and wish

we could implement one for our internal purposes.

But

the cost justification still does not warrant an implementation,"

says Anatha Krishnan, Senior Consultant, Tata Consultancy Services.

"If anything the Indian market is better suited to gain the

advantages of SAN technologies. The reason being that these are

mostly available on Unix and Windows platforms, and is in fact unifying

the twin juggernauts of the industry," explains Khan. Indian

enterprises, are considering the technology options for gaining

an edge over competitors. "Nevertheless, with the network storage

technologies still in their infancy, there is some amount of confusion

between SAN and NAS in the lower and mid end of the market,"

states Saha. HP, IBM and Compaq are getting their strategies in

place to attack this huge market for SAN and network storage technologies

in a big way. With all the promises and challenges ahead to make

the dream of an open SAN come true, the next decade, could very

well be the 'decade of storage'.

AKILA

SUBRAMANIAM



in Chennai

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