Redesigning strategy

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.

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 percent 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.

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 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 percent
hardware and 30 percent software and services in FY 2003—04 to 47 percent
hardware and 53 percent soft­ware in FY 2004—05. NetApp also benefited from
its two SIs-Wipro and Apara.

Veritas picked up Rs 50 crore-43
percent 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.

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.

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

(minuvs@cybermedia.co.in)