'The focus is shifting to business continuity'

SMBs lack the required skill sets to deploy and maintain the infrastructure

and, therefore, they demand support services, says Deb Dutta, vice president,

Asia Pacific/Japan, Brocade Communications Systems. He adds that the SMB segment

is a big opportunity for Brocade. Excerpts from an interview with Ravi Shekhar

Pandey of CyberMedia.

What are the key challenges that storage vendors must address?

Deb Dutta

We have been seeing our customers mature in terms of their focus shifting

from server storage consolidation to business continuity. The challenges we see

today are interconnecting islands (SAN, NAS or IP), building intelligence over

Fabric network to drive applications, and finally, seamlessly connecting all

different networks to increase the utility of computing. In simple terms,

customers will need their networks up and highly available, so applications

across these networks should be seamless, irrespective of the storage vendor.

Hence, the key challenge that IT administrators face is the interoperability of

the storage area network which connects the products of different storage

vendors' online without network failure, building security around the fabric

to manage data security, and ensuring that there is no down time.

Several vendors are trying to simplify storage and are targeting SMBs.

What role is Brocade playing in that?



The SMB market needs solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, and are

also cost effective at the same time. SMBs don't have the required skill

sets to deploy and maintain the infrastructure and, therefore, they demand

support services. Considering these factors many of our partners are already

offering different flavors of SMB SAN storage using Brocade SAN switches in

India.

Brocade recently launched professional services. Who is it aimed at and

what services do you plan to offer?



Brocade's professional services are designed with one ultimate objective

in mind-to provide the customer with superior experience, allowing them to

drive the maximum return from their investment in SAN technology. In order to

achieve this we offer a portfolio of services ranging from relatively simple

installation and configuration services to complex SAN design and analysis

services for large enterprises.

Don't you think your professional services would bring you in conflict

with your business partners who also offer such services?



We have put together a business model that gave the customer the service

they were looking for without threatening any services that were currently being

offered by our partners. The result is a partner-friendly model, where we

aim to sell services only through our partner network and therefore you can look

at this as a service not just to our customers, but also to our partners. Being

experts in the SAN domain, we encourage our partners to outsource the complex

SAN delivery to Brocade. Some of our partners have adequate capability to offer

such services themselves, and where this is the case, we encourage them to do

so. 

How would you describe the Indian market in terms of trends and

opportunities for vendors?



Indian market has been growing significantly in the past couple of years.

After China, India is the next biggest market where overall IT growth will be

seen. Brocade believes the opportunity for storage vendors is in three key

areas: enterprise segment will still be a significant spender-clear signs of

disaster recovery projects growing by 100% over last year; SMBs have just begun

to show signs to lead the market in the next couple of years. Another emerging

trend to be seen in 2005-2006 will be SAN blades, which will now enable

customers to address the server consolidation area. IBM has already launched

this last year. HP has introduced the 4 GB technology-based SAN blade this year.