Spotlight

Simplifying storage

NetApp believes that the more it simplifies things for its customers, the more the customers will benefit. By Vinita Gupta

NetApp came to India in 1992. It has been growing rapidly over the last four years, averaging over 40 percent revenue growth year-on-year. Globally the company had a turnover of $2.07 billion in fiscal 2006. Having a sustainable position in the fast growing Indian storage market is a clear priority for NetApp and it has been investing in people and infrastructure to take advantages of that growth.

”Complexity is serious especially in the storage world, because the amount of data is growing so fast. Simplifying Data Management is a quick summary of NetApp. It captures something that we care deeply about and focus much of our effort on,” says Vikram Shah, President – India Operations, NetApp.

NetApp storage solutions include specialised hardware, software, and services, providing storage management for open network environments. Major corporations and service providers, including Citicorp Securities, Lockheed, Merrill Lynch, Oracle, Texas Instruments, and Yahoo, utilise NetApp global data management solutions.

An important aspect of NetApp’s Indian presence is the rapid growth of the company’s engineering facility at Bangalore, which is now contributing significantly to the company’s technological innovation and is evolving into a multi-functional unit encompassing product development, partner solutions development, global customer support, global internal IT support and product management.

Shah adds, “Our Bangalore facility today provides NetApp customers with technological innovations in areas like IP SAN, virtual tape libraries, storage management, storage encryption, and enterprise data management. In addition, the centre develops, tests and certifies host attach kits for our SAN solutions.”

NetApp has more than 5,000 employees worldwide and in India it has grown to over 500 people which is a significant ramp up compared to even two years ago. From the customer facing perspective, the company has three sales offices in the country, and six spare parts logistics centres.

The company has sales, pre-sales and post-sales personnel at all the sales offices to directly engage with and support major customers. All its business in India is routed through channels and currently it has two SI partners (Wipro Infotech, Apara Enterprise Solutions) and two distribution partners (Ingram Micro, Inflow Technologies) to address the market.

“We have invested significantly in training programs to build competencies among our own teams as well as those of channel partners. In addition, we have on-going training programs for our customers to enable them to take full advantage of the functionality of our products,” says Shah.

Additionally, it is rolling out new marketing campaigns to increase its share in specific verticals as well as solution areas and has an active partner program in place, called the “VIP Partner Program” to register, enable and support its Tier 1 & 2 resellers.

The company has over 75,000 systems deployed worldwide. A large number of Fortune 1000 corporations are its customers and in India, the client base is over 300.

According to Shah, the company promises customers unmatched simplicity in the complex world of enterprise data management. This not only reduces cost, but also enables customers to minimise business risk and rapidly adapt to change. In addition, they have a comprehensive suite of solutions to help customers protect their strategic information assets.

He adds, “Our solutions are architecturally simple and built out of a deep understanding of a business’ challenges in managing the growing amounts of data throughout the enterprise.”

NetApp has won significant business from new customers across verticals such as media, digital animation and financial services helping it maintain its position in the networked storage market in India. From the product development perspective, it has full engineering ownership of key products that are still at the growth phase of their lifecycle.

Gartner believes, NetApp remains focused on the advantages of unified storage architecture, ease of use, improving utilisation rates, and low TCO.

ReplicatorX (rename of Topio Data Protection Suite) & Decru are examples of an important piece of NetApp strategy and that is to address the data protection needs of customers who do not necessarily have NetApp primary storage. This allows NetApp to expand beyond its immediate customer base and customers benefit by having data protection solutions that are not necessarily tied down by the limitations of their primary storage environment.

For e.g. Decru DataFort appliances encrypt data-at-rest and data-on-tape irrespective of the primary storage vendor or storage protocol used; these appliances work across NAS, FC SAN and IP SAN. ReplicatorX allows a customer to maintain up-to-the-minute back-up copies of primary data on NetApp SATA arrays at a business continuity site, leveraging NetApp FlexClone functionality to create clones of production data for faster test and development cycles.

Shah adds, “Decru & ReplicatorX are contributing to NetApp growth. In fact, our Virtual Tape Library (VTL) offering is also an important piece of our heterogeneous data protection offering and has seen rapid growth in the recent past.”

NetApp is aggressively looking at all industry segments where there is huge growth of data. As an example, one of the segments it intends to focus upon is the Technical Applications segment, covering the entire range of engineering/design applications like MCAD, PLM, CAE, EDA, Software Development, Oil & Gas Seismic Processing, Digital Animation, Analytics, etc.

Shah says, “From a product standpoint, we will continue to identify customer pain points and come up with market relevant and innovative solutions to address those. In addition to primary storage solutions around NAS and SAN, we will continue to work on data protection, data retention and data replication solutions.”

The company will continue to work on providing application-specific storage management features, to make life easier for application/server administrators, especially for major business applications like Microsoft Exchange/SQL, Oracle, SAP, VMWare, and so on. Another area of product development is their Data OnTap GX offering which caters to the demanding needs of High Performance Computing applications.

To address the increasing burdens of data ownership, there are three key areas of innovation in the storage industry—virtualisation, data management and scale-out storage. NetApp is on the leading edge of the curve with regards to these and other areas of innovation in the storage industry.