EMC aims to be king of enterprise storage market

T Srinivasan, country manager, EMC India, says, “The market for SAN and NAS is in a nascent stage. There is a lack of awareness in the market and therefore EMC’s strategy will be to create awareness for these types of solution and justify why they need network-based storage.”

EMC’s business strategy for 2002 will revolve around its three flagship products Symmetrix, Clarion and new product AutoIS. Earlier there was speculation that EMC may not be able to gain entry into the enterprise storage market. But in the Q4 2001 the company did some brisk business, bagging orders in telecom, banking and manufacturing from Bharati, Citibank and a manufacturing company. For 2002, its business strategy will be to continue focusing on these markets. Besides, the company will initiate awareness programmes to demonstrate how to automate and manage infrastructure in a simple way.

EMC is betting on AutoIS (Automated Information Storage), which can simplify administration, automate processes and which works on multiple platforms. AutoIS is a software that supports the world’s broadest range of multi-vendor network devices, and hosts storage resources and storage systems from Compaq, Dell, HDS, HP, Sun, IBM and NetApp, besides EMC. EMC’s strategy for this new product will be to bundle it with existing products and upgrades will be free. Srinivasan says, “Storage software works in tandem with storage hardware to provide an information infrastructure for businesses, call centres, service providers and e-businesses to execute, scale and provide better services. To get the optimal solution, a business must have storage hardware connected to storage software that uses the hardware in an optimal manner.”

EMC has a disaster recovery product called SRDF (Synchronous Recovery Data Faster) in the wings.

Legato aims for SME

Legato Systems, an enterprise storage management software vendor that helps companies protect, move and manage information sees big potential in India for the storage software solutions market. It estimates a market of $4-5 million for its solutions in India.

Legato’s India strategy will be to work closely with storage hardware vendors. The company has formed alliance partnerships with IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Quantum Systems. Compaq and Wipro are its system integrators that have their own channels across the country. Legato’s workgroup solution costs $1200 to $50,000 for enterprise storage solutions.

In 2002, the company sees growth in the small and medium enterprises segment. Says Nikhil Madan, country sales manager, Legato Systems India, “SME’s that have 10 GB of data need protection. We are introducing products that will cater to this market segment.”

Legato’s future plan is to grow market share in India. Madan says, “On the technology side, we will focus on server-less backups, clusters in heterogeneous environments and moving storage software from reactive to proactive mode. Products such as Celestra are targeted at enterprises requiring high-speed, server-less backups for the large amounts of data used by their enterprise level servers for mission critical information. Enterprises are continuously looking for software solutions to assist in the management of increased storage capacity.”

Hewlett-Packard aims to increase revenue share in storage market

HP’s strong focus on the banking and telecom sectors has seen it bag a couple of big projects in 2001 and it was the runner-up in the storage stakes last year. For 2002, HP sees growth in two areas automated backups and SAN implementations. Though banking will be HP’s core focus area, the company has aggressive plans for the petroleum industry as well and is betting big on this market space which it feels will see significant demand for storage after the government dismantles the Administered Price Mechanism next month. Another area of focus in 2002 will be the small and medium business sector. Overall, HP should continue to be the second largest vendor in the storage market after Compaq. In 2002, HP would be in a better position in terms of revenue share.

Avijit Basu, marketing manager, NSSO, HP India, says, “Because of storage consolidation, we see growth in investment on high-end storage infrastructure. These include automated backups and SAN implementations.” From the point of view of technology investments, HP foresees that customers would go for LTO/Ultrium (Linear Tape Open) and autoloaders, libraries as well as scalable virtualised disk array solutions and the company has worked out specific strategies for specific industry segments.

“We also see growth in the business continuity and disaster recovery management space that would need highly available, robust, remote backup and disk arrays with features like no single point of failure and five nines uptime in SAN infrastructure,” adds Basu.

HP also feels that storage consolidation will happen in its focus business like banking and telecom in 2002. HP has been always strong in high-end disk storage with its XP Series of disk arrays. “Earlier, we were not addressing the entry-level mid-size external NT storage market. Now we have the strong Disk System 2000 Series and the VA 7000 Series. The big deals take time to mature,” says Basu. He added that extended manufacturing is the next potential industry and SMEs are a lucrative market this year. HP’s strategy here would be to provide cost effective and easy to implement entry- to mid-size automated products and disk arrays.

Big Blue bets on SANs

IBM expects storage to grow hand in hand with the server market and is actively looking at SAN and expects the Indian storage market to grow five to ten times in the next five years. It has set up 10 IBM TotalStorage Solution Centres in ASEAN/ SA jointly with business partners to help customers accelerate the adoption of SAN in their computing infrastructure as well as identify how their storage needs can be met.

Three of these centres are located in India in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. In 2002, IBM will be delivering storage products that are based on open industry standards. It offers the widest portfolio of disk and tape storage solutions for enterprise, NAS, SAN and IP storage customers. IBM’s product strategy will be push Enterprise Storage Server, Modular Storage Server, and the FAStT200 RAID storage server in the market. These products can provide automated disk storage for consolidated environments, providing easier management and better asset utilisation. Its Linear Tape-Open Ultrium tape libraries can enable multiple servers to share a single tape library, helping to reduce costs and tape handling damage.

On the technology, side IBM is plugging intelligence into its products that will reduce the burden of administrators in mainframe machines autonomic storage is what it’s called. This would help an entire storage system devices, networks, data objects and management software to manage itself, operating under pre-established business objectives and policies, and would not require an army of experts to manage things. IBM officials say this will help the company in Project Eliza to develop self-managing servers.

Compaq seeks to continue domination

Compaq dominated the storage market in India for the third year in succession with 367.1 TB and a 45.78 percent market share in H1 2001. The vendor recorded a growth of 153.2 percent year-on-year and 3 percent as compared to the second half of 2000. In terms of revenues Compaq recorded $29 million in H1 2001. Sources at Compaq put its total revenues from storage in 2001 at $58 million. Owais Khan, business manager-storage products, Compaq India, says, “This year we are expecting to grow by 20 percent.”

He adds that Compaq’s storage strategy for this year will be based on three pillars SAN, NAS and tape solutions. Compaq is expecting double digit growth in NAS. Compaq’s biggest strength continues to be its leadership in the entry-level server space, an area that contributes the most to the storage market. It has introduced some new products like the MSA 1000, which lets enterprises move data from DAS to SANs. The company has sold 25 to 30 units of MSA 1000 to the banking segment. The bulk of Compaq’s business is still happening in traditional areas like finance and banking, telecom and retail because of its widely installed base of Intel-based servers.

StorageTek plans heavy investments

StorageTek, a prominent player in automated tape solutions and storage networking views India as an important market in the A-PAC region. The company plans to invest $14 million in the Indian market for expanding operations over the next three years. With its direct presence in India, StorageTek sees significant growth opportunities in sectors like banking, finance, insurance and telecom, where the quantum of data storage is bound to increase exponentially in 2002. It expects that 2002 will see demand for automated tape libraries and SAN.

Vijay Pradhan, general manager, StorageTek India, says, “We feel that automated tape libraries will grow at 35-40 percent in 2002. We are also planning to expand our offices in Chennai and New Delhi and strengthen our channels.”

The company has recently won orders from ICICI Bank, Cisco, Synopsys and Lucent Technologies in India. BPCL and Bajaj Automobiles are customers in the manufacturing segment.

Quantum eyes massive growth in India

Quantum, one of the world’s largest suppliers of tape drives, expects the Indian storage market to explode in the second half of 2002. This year, the company will be focusing on network attached storage (NAS) beyond the workgroup level with Quantum’s Snap Server for the entry level and mid-range NAS market. Quantum has an installed base of 200 Snap servers over the last four quarters. Last year, the company witnessed 100 percent growth, and it is expecting higher growth in 2002.

Says Louis Lye, business development manager, Asia-Pacific, Quantum Storage Singapore, “We see Indian companies moving into the higher end of storage. More than 50 percent of our sales are for the mid-range 4100 series system.” This year the company will focus on verticals such as banking and finance, education, government, and the scientific sector (especially India’s remote sensing agency).

“While Quantum’s Snap is essentially for low-end storage as against EMC systems, which cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in India most demand has come from large companies and not SMEs,” said Lye. He however said that the company would try to break into the SME market in 2002.

Quantum wants to increase its number of storage solution resellers in India to around 20 per city. Quantum is also moving from being just a box-pusher in India to a complete storage solution provider.