Interview

"Implementing a DR site in a B-class city may be unfeasible."

Vijay Pradhan, General Manager, StorageTek International discusses emerging trends in storage with Shipra Arora

* B and C class cities are getting a lot of attention from most IT vendors. Why are smaller cities not on your agenda?

We have around 200 installations in India that are concentrated in the bigger cities. StorageTek plays a role when customers have a large amount of data that they want to store, manage or protect in a given data centre or campus. There could be such users in B class cities but we have not seen data growth of the same level in [B class cities] that one sees in data centres located in the major cities. Even Disaster Recovery (DR) sites are located in metros as implementing a DR site in a B-class city can result in concerns about getting the right infrastructure, resources and skills. Users tend to look at another large city for their backup DR site. So we are going to be concentrating on [A-class cities] for now.

Our focus is on telecom, banking, technology and government. We are seeing MNCs giving more work and flexibility to Indian entities that do the work for them. So, we are now in a situation where data resides in India. Parent organisations are slowly moving their data here. In the call centre space, recent legal stipulations requiring the recording and storage of voice communications have created fresh demand for storage.

* CIOs face exploding storage requirements, How can they tackle this problem?

CIOs are being asked to do more with less at a time when organisational data storage is perpetually increasing. IDC predicts that storage should see a 65 percent CAGR between now and 2007. IT by itself doesn’t generate revenue. It delivers a service to another department, be it finance, marketing or production. These departments do the work that earns the organisation its revenue.

An organisation cannot control growth in storage capacity. CIOs can work out a metric of measurement of efficiency of storage resources. Rather than look at RoI, I suggest measuring how many dollars per gigabyte of storage a company is operating at. This can be the metric that measures storage efficiency.

* Where do you see storage technology evolving?

The layering of storage capacity will take advantage of different storage media in the cost hierarchy. Storage virtualisation is coming up, it reduces the complexity of managing varied storage media. I see unification taking place where the customer doesn’t buy a SAN or NAS, but buys storage. Protocols such as iSCSI and FCIP will facilitate this trend. Customers don’t know how their storage is going to grow and at what rate each storage category (SAN, NAS, DAS etc.) will grow. In this scenario it’s possible that customers end up investing more into SAN-based storage that doesn’t grow at the predicted rate whereas NAS grows at a faster rate than expected. Here you have idle capacity lying in the SAN that can’t be utilised by the NAS. Unified storage lets a CIO re-allocate storage. We already implemented this concept in India, particularly in the technology sector.