“Virtualisation will be next wave in enterprise storage”

HP is aggressively pushing concepts like storage virtualisation and high-availability. John Christopher, director of R&D, NSSO Asia-Pacific, Hewlett-Packard, talks about the importance of virtualisation and high availability for enterprise class companies in a conversation with Rahul Neel Mani

Please explain HP’s high-availability and storage virtualisation strategy

CIOs today are concerned with just one thing—how to do more with less money. This trend is particularly visible in the storage technology segment. However, using virtualisation this problem can be tackled. The enterprise virtual array (EVA) is the most suitable offering from HP. This EVA product caters to almost all segments of industry—small, medium or large enterprises. Normally, if you need to have additional storage capacity it’s a tedious exercise requiring a high level of expertise. HP provides that expertise to customers through virtualisation. This technology is different from conventional solutions where storage is added according to demand. In virtualisation, the concept is of a virtual disk and of data that is spread across blocks. There is no reconfiguring, no remapping and no need for any storage addition—it’s all done automatically. This whole system has automatic replication, so that in case of a failure there is access available to data.

Virtualisation is not really catching up in India. What are the reasons for this?

With respect to the APEC region, India is way ahead in terms of adopting technology, especially high availability technologies. Even with the challenges posed by the existing telecom infrastructure, Indian firms are doing quite well. People don’t really go with leading-edge technology such as virtualisation, but there are examples where we have seen enterprise companies understanding the real value of high-availability. India already has a good number of installations of the Virtual Array 7000 series from HP, which takes care of virtualisation with Auto RAID technology. We have a good customer base for EVA 5000 as well. Generally, telecom companies, the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector and manufacturing companies are embracing this technology.

If we talk of the BFSI sector—the most data-intensive industry segment there is—how can virtualisation be set up there?

It’s a broad answer. There are a lot of things outside of virtualisation that need to be taken into account. The first issue is high-availability, the second data delivery. Most banks have ATMs on their network, which need to be managed. From a storage perspective you have to take care of the need for 24x7 access to data. Banks and non-banking financial companies have to go for a number of EVAs in that situation. To avoid any failure in the system, it has to be ensured that there are multiple controllers. So, it’s availability in the first place, then the deployment of EVAs, and to top it all, a SAN network. There also have to be a number of duplication points where the data automatically gets backed up and can be used as a failover option. In banks, core banking automation is the order of the day. From the virtualisation point of view, at a branch level, one can think of deploying a Virtual Array 7000 series to take care of both backup and online storage solution. In addition, there is an uploader or tape library needed as a backup. In the case of core banking one can look at a high-end solution such as the EVA 5000. For server virtualisation, HP offers Virtual Replicator in the Proliant series. If you are also looking at IP connectivity, then we have a continuous access storage appliance (CASA), which is part of the appliance and provides virtualisation across the network. Here we can say that a company is using virtualisation all across. It is not just the case with the banking industry, it can be replicated in other industry segments as well.

How big is the market for virtualisation in India?

Virtualisation across storage has already happened. The next step would be CASA type of virtualisation across networks. Very few companies have actually gone ahead with disaster recovery systems. Those who have opted for DR have already taken the decision a year back, when virtualisation was at its infancy. We can’t accurately predict the market size, but yes, awareness is really growing at a high rate and people are asking for virtualisation solutions.