Sun Microsystems

Sun is bullish about affordable SAN infrastructure offerings in India. It hopes that its 3300 class storage series with Fibre Channel (FC) at a starting price of Rs 7.5 lakh will prove popular with Indian SMEs this year. Anil Valluri, director systems engineering at Sun Microsystems says, “We hope that our low-cost SAN infrastructure will be very successful in India not only due to the cost factor but also because it can run smoothly with Windows, Linux or UNIX servers.” Recently Sun implemented its SAN infrastructure in a large Indian bank, which is using Sun servers. It has implemented its solution at a government IT department running on a Windows server. Valluri adds, “We have come out of our traditional approach that allowed Sun’s storage solutions to support only Sun’s systems.”

Besides this, Sun will also go all-out in promoting its N1 storage virtualisation switch amongst Indian enterprises in 2004-05. Sun is also optimistic that Information Lifecycle Management will catch up in India and is going to promote its storage resource manager solution along with other solutions, as part of its strategy to promote ILM. Valluri says, “We are as such not focused on providing any individual solution for ILM; many solutions put together cater to this concept. We have solutions that cater to online, nearline and archival storage needs.”

Sun will also promote its Infinite mail box storage solution in India in a big way. This solution is offered to Lotus customers and is aimed at providing unlimited storage to them. There are plans to bring out new products in the iSCSI space. Sun also has plans to expand its channel network and organise more marketing focused seminars. Valluri says, “We will aim to popularise our ‘train the trainers programme’ and would actively work to educate Indian customers on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandates that all companies dealing with US customers must preserve their data for five years at the least.” Sun has a specialised team of storage consultants, which includes specialised consultants and architects who will embark on this awareness programme in a major way.

Network Appliance

Having established operations in India in 2002, Network Appliance has done well in the Indian market and is one of the leading players here. It recently implemented its filer system at Sasken Technologies in Bangalore, HDFC-Standard Life Insurance in Mumbai and is in the process of installing filers at John Keells Holdings in Sri Lanka. It recently added Network Solutions to the portfolio of system integrators, which already include Wipro and Apara.

Currently, Network Appliance is carrying out three large installations in the iSCSI space, including customers from manufacturing, software development and banking. The company plans to introduce products related to the storage grid in 2004. Its filers will be continuously upgraded. At the global level Network Appliance acquired Spinnaker Networks as part of its engineering operations, which will help it deliver n-way clustering eventually (right now two filers can be clustered). Sandeep Dutta, director strategic partnerships and marketing, Network Appliance India says, “We focus on large enterprises and continue to do so through system integrators who install and provide support services around our products.”

Network Appliance is also in the process of increasing its software development and support centre staff in Bangalore from 65 employees to 300 by the end of 2005. The additional staff will shore up the centre’s software development and global support operations. Of the new employees, 200 will be in engineering and 100 will be in the global support centre. After the staff increase, Indian employees will account for 10 percent of Network Appliance’s global head count. The Bangalore centre is currently working on the development of Network Appliance’s NetCache product line.

Hewlett-Packard

The leading player in the disk and external storage space in India, HP recently implemented a second DR site for BPCL. It is working on implementing additional DR sites for three more customers. The major focus for 2004 will be to upgrade its existing product line.

HP will be making its NAS products more powerful by incorporating high end-NAS heads. Products like StorageWorks 9000s, StorageWorks NAS 4000s and StorageWorks NAS 2000s will be offered.

HP plans to come out with a high-end disc array solution with a larger cache. It will also release an extended library architecture that will provide more intelligence to the library so as to make it SAN-ready on the day it is installed. There are plans to come up with more powerful Fibre Channel switches during the next six months.

Avijit Basu, marketing manager, Network Storage Solution (NSS), HP India says, “ILM would be one of our major focus areas. We will now be bundling our e-mail archiving system with all the storage hardware we offer to our Indian customers. We will be targeting the health services sector through this.”

Basu says, “We will offer customers more buyback schemes and focus on upgrading their existing storage networks. SMEs will be our main target segment in 2004, especially those who are going in for storage solutions for the first time.”

HP has also embarked on an exhaustive training programme for its end-users and partners, aimed at giving them a first-hand feel of how to utilise their storage resources more efficiently. A four-day programme has already been run in Mumbai and Delhi and would be extended to other cities as well in 2004. HP would hope to capitalise on the NAS-SAN fusion trend, which is taking place in the Indian market and would also tap the trend of more and more customers going in for a business continuity plan to be followed by a DR site.

IBM

2003 was a healthy year for the Indian storage market. According to IDC, from Q1 to Q3 of 2003 storage was a $100 million market with 3,000 terabytes of capacity shipped. Of this, $70 million was accounted for by external storage and $30 million by internal storage. IDC estimates that the Indian storage market will grow at a CAGR of 65 percent till 2007. IDC says HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance are the leading players in the Indian storage market. Verticals like telecom, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing and the newly emerging ITeS sector in India will be the biggest spenders on storage. SMEs are also expected to go in for storage in a big way this year.

Networked storage hits 50 percent mark

IDC estimates that network storage already accounts for 50 percent of the overall storage market in India. Naveen Mishra, senior analyst for computing products research group at IDC India, says, “Enterprises have realised the benefits that come with networked storage. Data requirements are increasing and direct attached storage (DAS) is unable to cope with this exponential growth. Moreover, networked storage has also become affordable and we see even SMEs going in for it.”

It has been observed that late adopters of storage in India are going in for storage consolidation and this is driving the networked storage market.

V Vivekanand, business development manager, Hitachi Data Systems, says, “SAN-NAS consolidation has helped enterprises reap better RoI. The new breed of applications like billing applications, banking applications (core, trade and Internet banking), along with customer care applications, which help customers access data through five or six channels, are prompting enterprises to go in for networked storage.”

Many enterprises that went in for storage consolidation are now going in for Disaster Recovery (DR) sites and enterprises that had only one Disaster Recovery site have gone in for multiple sites. For instance, BPCL went in for its second DR site recently. Gurgaon-based GE Capital has gone in for five DR sites across the country. This trend is expected to continue in 2004, driving the networked storage market to new heights.

Low-cost SANs to become popular

Low-cost, entry-level SAN boxes are expected to gain popularity this year. The SME segment is expected to drive the low-cost SAN market. Entry-level SAN prices are falling and an entry-level SAN of 500 GB can cost as little as Rs 7 to 7.5 lakh. A low-cost SAN is an integrated package that includes a Fibre Channel switch, high-performance software and disk storage that can be hooked up to two servers.

The demand for low-cost SAN boxes is coming from B- and C-class cities in addition to metros as companies in manufacturing hubs such as Pune, Coimbatore and Cochin are buying low-cost SANs in big numbers. IDC expects that vendors will increase the

number of system integrators and channel partners to penetrate deeper into the country. Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-Storage, IBM Global Services says, “Our entry-level SAN product, Fibre Array Storage Technology (FAStT) family has done well in India and besides being affordable it has debunked the myth that SANs are complicated. Our SAN-made-simple campaign in India has been very successful in this regard.”

ILM implementations expected in 2004-05

There are going to be substantial information lifecycle management (ILM) implementations in the next two years. That said, only large enterprises that generate huge amounts of data will take to this concept. Mishra of IDC says, “The adoption of ILM is happening in India in bits and pieces and we expect to see increasing awareness about ILM amongst Indian enterprises in 2004. Today, it is more of a pre-sales activity undertaken by vendors.”

Vendors such as HP and Hitachi Data Systems are bullish about ILM and hope that it will be adopted by large organisations in 2004. Vivekanand of Hitachi Data Systems says, “Indian enterprises who have to comply to US regulations, and who are listed in the US, will go in for ILM in a big way. An enterprise in the telecom and the banking space needs to preserve data for an average time span of 8-10 years and now they have started archiving their data, especially their e-mail.” HDS is in the process of implementing its data lifecycle solutions in four enterprises from the BFSI and the software services segments.

It needs to be observed that identification of critical data and then segregating it on a priority basis will be a tedious affair requiring huge investments as it requires a through audit of storage assets and re-engineering of storage systems to streamline ILM adoption. Going by this fact, ILM’s adoption will be a gradual affair in India.

iSCSI has potential

There is lot of hype about iSCSI but its adoption is yet to take off. Mishra says, “The low cost of iSCSI implementation and manageability will be a key driver for iSCSI adoption in India.” There are still a limited number of products in the iSCSI space, but the fact that it facilitates high speed connectivity and has no distance limitations are major potential drivers for its large-scale adoption in 2004. New entrant, Acer, is bullish about the potential of iSCSI products in India. It has many iSCSI products in its product road map. Ashwin N, assistant product marketing manager, Acer India says, “iSCSI facilitates the remote replication of data very smoothly and there are few specialised skill sets required to implement and manage it.”

With greater standardisation in the iSCSI space expected in 2004, many vendors are hopeful that SMEs will adopt IP-SANs. Idris T Vasi, director, optical and storage networking Cisco Systems, Asia-Pacific says, “The 2.0 iSCSI standard will facilitate and drive iSCSI adoption in India. The ubiquity of IP networks will provide a firm base for the deployment of IP-SANs.”

S R Prasannakumar, senior product manager, Xserve India says, “We are geared to support iSCSI requirement if the customer chooses to implement it. Indian customers take time in adopting new technologies unless the cost-benefit ratio is really good. Even on a worldwide level iSCSI technology is still in its early stages and there are not too many significant implementations. As such, we believe that it may be early next year that some implementations of iSCSI are seen in India.”

But some vendors note that iSCSI adoption will depend on the requirements of enterprises. Arun Rawtani, country TSG manager, EMC Data Storage says, “Enterprises will continue to hold their critical servers that require higher bandwidth on the SAN while those which are less critical and do not require high bandwidth will make use of iSCSI.”

Storage consultIng picks up

The storage consulting market is expected to pick up in 2004. ILM is expected to be the key driver for this market. K N Prasad, head marketing and alliances, Apara Enterprise Solutions says, “Enterprises adopting ILM will go in for an intelligent assessment of their existing data, which will help them prioritise data as per its criticality. This includes going in for an audit of storage resources and then re-engineering the storage architecture to facilitate ILM adoption. This task is likely to be outsourced to third-party storage consultants in India.” It is also being observed that Indian enterprises are taking the assistance of third-party storage consultants to plan their DR set-ups.

Rana Dutta, regional director-APAC, Movinture Storage Networks says, “The potential for storage consultancy in India is huge. Customers in India are seeking our assistance to define business goals with respect to their storage infrastructure, which involves doing a thorough analysis of their current set-up, identifying issues related to service levels and technology obsolescence factors, after which we design and deploy the proposed storage infrastructure.”

Networked storage is here to stay

A few years back, DAS dominated the Indian storage market scene. The last two years have seen a shift and networked storage has dominated. SMEs who were mainly on DAS are now looking to networked storage. Vendors have reconfigured their market strategy and are targeting SMEs aggressively with low-cost network storage devices.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com