'Virtualization, Big data and Cloud are the Big 3'

Mike Prieto is vice president and general manager of HP Storage in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). In this position, he is responsible for leading the end- to-end management of the division, which comprises of HP's entire external storage product portfolio, which includes SAN, NAS, Tape, associated Storage Infrastructure Products, and Software.

Prieto was previously sales director for HP Storage in APJ and responsible for overall sales.

Prieto has over 20 years experience in the IT industry, specifically in the server, storage, operating systems, and messaging arena. He has extensive product, services, and solutions experience, and his functional experience includes sales, pre sales, operational and technical roles.

In an interview to DATAQUEST some time back, Mike Prieto talked about trends in storage space.

 1. What are the prevailing trends in the storage currently?

We see a big shift towards cloud which is operating at a different speed in different countries in Asia. The shift to virtualization, big data and Cloud are obviously the big three today.

The other recent trend is the software defined infrastructure. Software defined storage and software defined networking is gathering speed. The Store Virtual Technology, which is the left hand acquisition that we made, it takes pools of storage from low cost service and represent it as one. The software defined infrastructure is a niche area but its picking up at a good speed.

As far as India concerned, adoption of Cloud and Big Data is speeding up. India is looking at simplifying their storage infrastructure and most of them are moving a lot of dollars from their operations expenses to innovation.

Earlier vendors used to decide what shall be offered to the consumer but we observe that today, it's the customer who decides what a service provider must sell. The customer wants a customized solution according to their business needs and is focused on 3R that is :Return of Information, Return of Individual, and Return of Infrastructure.

2. Where is the major traction coming from - the enterprise customers or the SMB customers? As enterprise customers have the money but mid-market customers are also coming up.

It's a mix bag. The traction is coming from both sides. Countries like Australia adoption rate of cloud is more as compared to other countries. Also a sizeable proportion of mid-sized companies are moving some of their services on cloud . In enterprise space also the companies are selective. The big organizations are opting for cloud for only some of their applications. So it's really a mixed bag between big enterprises, mid-sized companies and SMB.

One key trend that we see in India that the distinction between the enterprise customer and SMB customer is shrinking because of:
1.SMB customer's ability to spend is ,increasing
2.They are far more flit footed than the traditional companies
3.Flexible in thinking process
4.Adaptive to innovation and technologies
5.Readiness to go to market
This is leading to a new dimension customer existing in the market and benefiting the service providers like us. Secondly, because of this trend the decision making cycles are getting shorter in corporate space.

3. What is HPs strategy for Unified storage, as we see most of the service providers these days are offering Unified Storage?

 

All the providers are giving Unified storage and HP is also one of them. Unified storage in easy term means handling the block from one single console which is a standard across all storage vendors.

HP is on top of this is offering the Converged Storage and what we are propagating will going forward become the heart of the entire data center. We will also bring polymorphic simplicity to the entire landscape of storage which will enable the customer to save the data on the primary storage, analyze the data in the fastest possible way and also protect the data with the new technology we have launched - Store Once Technology which will be able to do a disk to disk backup and restore. We are trying to simplify and bring the different storage architectures together.

4. How is Big data impacting Storage?

Big Data is very real, it's here and now; the proliferation of the data whether is human generated or machine generated data is exploding. Impact has been tremendous in terms of ability to store data and handle data growth.

Big Data in India is becoming reality. Majority of large Indian Corporates have data in analog format and are hurrying up to convert it to digital. Also data created these days is highly unstructured and it's important to manage the unstructured growth.
The customers need to look at simplification in managing the unstructured data growth to avoid the complexity going further.