“We advise people to adopt the networked storage approach”

Steve East, vice president, Global Account Technology, Hitachi Data Systems, shares his views on what is driving growth in the storage segment with GAURAV PATRA

What’s your take on the storage market in India?

A number of developments are driving the consumption of storage. Price- point is one of the biggest concerns for most Indian users. Compliance regulations, new application development and focus on operational expense reduction are also driving the growth of storage. Technologies around SAN are becoming more affordable. Primarily, these factors are driving the growth of the storage market. India is going through an era of IT transformation. A lot of money is being spent on getting records online and making them accessible to everyone concerned, specially in sectors like government, telcos, BFSI and manufacturing. This shift is the prime driver of the storage segment in India.

Keeping that in mind, what should be the storage strategy of companies here?

The biggest problem with organisations is that they do not evaluate their needs before deciding on storage solutions. We advise people to adopt the networked storage approach. This allows consolidation of data, the movement from DAS to centralised storage repositories. In order to do that, IT managers in enterprises need to understand the management aspect of storage. Centralised repository is very important since it addresses issues like allocation of storage to certain groups within the organisation, and cooperation between the storage and database administrators. Companies should concentrate more on processes like training, tools, business processes and automation. This will help the operation to become more efficient and responsive. It will also help them to respond to any business driver that the company needs to focus on.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is one area that almost all storage vendors are focusing on. How is this space evolving? What are the initiatives Hitachi is taking?

ILM is still evolving. One of the most important principles of ILM is that data should reside in the most appropriate place based on characteristics of the data. There are three kinds of data. The first is structured data, which is mission-critical, tied up with the core business, and managed by the database administrator and database systems. The problem is that when it continues to grow, one has to go through some kind of process to move up all the records. The challenge here is the new regulations and compliance rules. Now you need a mechanism to operate and protect the data smoothly. Hitachi is presently creating multi-tiered storage—primary, secondary and archival—and allowing that to move between the tiers and also to protect records.

In the case of semi-structured data like e-mail, you have some sort of archival system to archive attachments, but cannot keep them in the storage system. However, you still see them as a record within your e-mail system.

Then there is unstructured data. What we suggest is that users wrap it around with ILM—multi-tiered expensive enterprise storage for primary storage, mid-range products for secondary storage, and ATA or low-cost drives at the low-end.

For successful ILM, one needs to have a technology that has multi-tiers of hardware, and also needs to have the asset management component.

Which storage technologies does Hitachi want to promote in the near future?

We have four pillars of growth. SAN and NAS are two of them. SAN is our bread and butter; we have some high-end, high-capacity SAN products. In NAS, we have announced our relationship with Network Appliance and we sell their gateway products. Very soon we will be announcing our blade strategy. Apart from these, we have also recognised ILM as a focus area. We have the right kind of technology, but service is one area where we still have to build momentum. On the storage resource and management side, we have Hitachi Services Storage Manager.

You have already acquired mindshare in India. How are you planning to convert it to marketshare?

We will have to build more partnerships to make ourselves heard here. As part of that strategy we have recently signed up with Ingram Micro. India is a growing market and we think there is a huge opportunity in segments like government, BFSI and telecom. We are also looking at increasing the professional side of the business. We have been focusing on the enterprise market; now we have also started pushing the mid-range and smaller enterprise markets.