DATA Storage : Quantum Power

Quantm Net Technologies is in storage business since 2000, and 30 percent of
its revenues comes from storage solutions and products. Besides storage, the
company deals with servers, network and security solutions and products. The
company is working with several big enterprises in storage space, and expects
its revenue figure to double in about a year's time.

Sanjay Bakshi, CEO, Quantm Net Technologies shared that when he forayed into
storage space, there were two major challenges that he had to face. First was
that earlier, there was no concept of buying storage and security products
separately. Acceptance of third-party attach was not widely accepted. Secondly,
typical enterprises about 10 years ago did not have large size data either,
unlike today, where even small firms are using updated technologies to
consolidate and virtualize their valuable data.

“Nowadays, there are multiple opportunities for SPs in the space of storage
consolidation and virtualization, telecom industry and data warehousing
projects. But now there are also challenge like multiple products, which are
available in the market without clear distinction on features and applications.
Also, current budgeting priorities do not include disaster recovery as an
important part,” shared Bakshi.

Sanjay Bakshi, CEO Quantm Net Technologies

Throwing light on the usual customer demands, he outlined that today
customers want solutions which are unified, consolidated, scalable and give them
single point of access for data management. According to him, storage
investments didn't see any dip due to slowdown. “Past one year saw the emergence
of unified storage solutions, and coming year would be the year of storage
virtuali­zation,” Bakshi added.

He is also satisfied when it comes to the initiatives that vendors take to
ensure that SPs are updated with the right storage solutions for their target
customer verticals. “These days, SPs are themselves well-trained to offer right
level of skills on storage solution architecting and consultancy to their
customers. Also, vendors regularly conduct training sessions and demonstrations
of their products, which keep us upbeat, and also we are updated about the
customer's requirements,” he shared, ranking support from IBM, EMC, Sun
Microsystems in that order.

SNAP INTERVIEW
		Prakash Krishnamurthy Country Manager-StorageWorks India, HP		AL Jagannath, GM-Marketing, Sun Microsystems		Vishwanath Ramaswamy Director-Partner and Alliances, EMC India and SAARC
How can the cost incurred in storage be controlled?	Organizations should start deploying Storage Resource Managers (SRM). It's a broad category under which comes a product called 'Storage Essentials'		Information lifecycle management (ILM) integrated with identity management is a sustainable storage strategy that balances the cost of storing and managing in formation.		Archiving, data de-duplication and tiering are some of the cost-effective practices that can be exploited.
What are your recent offerings in storage space?	Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) model, Left Hand Network products and MSA 2000		Sun Storage 7000 family and Open Solaris		SAN CLARiiON, Envision, Celerra Manager

Rachna Gupta

rachnagu@cybermedia.co.in