Digitally Yours

It's the digital world! And, with unexpected growth
of digital data in the recent times, it has been
witnessed that the demand for portable storage devices has also increased tremendously. The demand for storage is obviously being driven by the fact that external storage, flash drives, media players, and even desktop drives are now fast moving devices. The number of individuals and enterprises to whom high capacity storage is indispensable is rising by the day. Even stronger is the need for affordable and reliable devices. “For all these reasons, manufacturers have drastically brought down prices of personal storage devices over the past couple of years. All these factors have resulted in an ideal market for Indian buyers, thereby driving demand and consumption,” said Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Director (Sales)-Middle East, Africa and South Asia, Western Digital.

According to a Gartner report, the Indian storage peripheral market has registered a growth of 36 percent over the previous fiscal, clearly indicating the heavy commoditization of the devices. With new age storage medium replacing the traditional magnetic and optical storage devices, flash memory has gained overwhelming popularity. Portability, ease of use and mobility are the key factors that have made these devices the dear of the consumers.

Today, a USB or flash drive has gone beyond being just data storage devices to becoming lifestyle devices. And, with the rise in mobile phone adoption in India, the market for flash memory cards has been witnessing exponential growth. “On the technology front, faster interfaces and improved performance in smaller form factors have been made widely available. Devices and components supporting USB 3.0 and FireWire interfaces, and even the next-generation SATA III have been quickly adopted by consumers. Direct compatibility with camcorders, TVs, blue-ray disc players, media players, and PlayStation is now available on some portable drives like the My Passport AV. Keeping ease of use in mind, Western Digital is now offering the My Passport Studio, which features a customizable e-label that indicates available capacity and security status even when the drive is unplugged,” said Saifuddin. As use of multimedia applications like music, video, pictures, games in multimedia handsets are increasing, the consumption of MMC and Micro SD cards are growing tremendously.

Furthermore, the increased use of Smartphone is another factor driving the growth of flash cards in addition to the growing insurgence of cheaper Chinese handsets in India, being launched by local brands and fully loaded with high-end multimedia features and applications like gaming, music, pictures and social networking. Talking about this recent growth, Chris Chang, Managing Director, ADATA Technology, said, “In Indian market, more people are willing to purchase high-end mobile phone and laptop. Meanwhile, people use more portable storage between office and home. This pushes the memory cards, UFD, portable HDD, and SSD to grow. The inquiry in storage space is growing, and the quantity per person is growing.” Also, over the years, data storage emerged as one of the most talked-about issues in the hardware and software industries. As a result, many of the MNCs are coming up with ideas to utilize the existing and latest trends of data storage to the fullest.

The latest trends in the data storage are online and data virtualization. And, most of the experts feel, online storage will remain as one of the powerful trends in the next decade as well. Whereas, Harikrishna Prabhu, Director Channels-India, Hitachi Data Systems said, “In the coming years, the acceptance of storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning will accelerate most as it becomes the foundation for cloud and for dynamic, high availability datacenters.” Storage virtualization, the virtualization of external storage arrays, will provide the ability to non-disruptively migrate from one array to another and eliminate the costly down time required to refresh storage systems, and dynamic provisioning enables storage to be provisioned in a matter of minutes, simplifying performance tuning with automatic wide striping, and enabling on demand capacity for an agile storage infrastructure. Besides online, virtualization and dynamic provisioning; data de-duplication is also one of the key trends, that is, likely to gain popularity among users. The process involves deletion of duplicate and redundant data that add to the storage space needs. By following the procedure of de-duplication, the industry experts are able to spare a lot of storage space. It also reduces the overall storage cost that an enterprise may have to face. Moreover, it also improves the speed of storing, backing up, and accessing data.

So, with storage spaces trends gaining in the market, there would also be need of an infrastructure model. And, explaining that the cloud computing will be the next driver for the storage market, Prabhu of Hitachi said, “Cloud will most probably be accepted as a valid infrastructure model. Although ,some hype will still be associated with 'cloud,' there will be enough proof points to prove the concept. On-ramps to the cloud will facilitate the acceptance as well as management tools and orchestration layers that provide the end-to-end transparency to ensure service level objectives and chargeback.”

And, with the demand of data de-duplication likely to increase, virtual tiering is likely to be adopted for data life cycle management. Virtual tiering has the ability to assign a volume to a pool of storage containing multiple performance, cost, tiers of storage and the intelligence to move parts of that volume to different tiers based on access counts. The user does not need to classify a volume and assign it to a tier of storage, nor move the volume up and down the tiers based on activity. Virtual tiering, or dynamic tiering, will do it automatically without the need to classify the volume and move the entire volume from tier to tier. Also, to deploy the storage applications faster, convergence in the datacenter is likely to take off. The convergence of server, storage and network infrastructure will make it simpler and faster to deploy applications. The use of server, hypervisor, storage, and network virtualization will be key factor to provide an open platform to ensure investment protection and customer choice.

“The continued exponential growth of digital content combined with convergence of storage and entertainment technologies will shape vendors' plans for the year ahead. The ability to create and store personal digital content and enterprise content in a secure manner will gain prominence,” affirmed Saifuddin.

SPs effect in the Game

And, this growth in the storage space is not only helping vendors to expand their business, but solution provider like Precision Infomatic has also witnessed a huge growth in its business. The Chennai-based Precision Infomatic, is one of the leading system integrator in India, which is involved in the extending end-to-end solution for any business process. It has successfully managed to set up a nation wide network which has further built a technical strength in extending total solution in setting up IT infrastructure ranging from servers, storage, network, datacenter building, and many more.

V Murali, CEO of Precision Infomatic said, “With the concept of datacentre and virtualization ruling, the storage market is on rise. Every year, we witness about 40 percent of growth from the storage sector, and especially in India, tremendous opportunities are seen in the SMB sector.” He also said that data storage is the need of the customer, and it is driving our business in the market. And all the solution providers should invest more in training the channel partners in demonstrating the new and advanced solutions to the market.

Describing about the technical capabilities about Precision Infomatic, Murali explained that the technical capabilities has been built for server consolidation, storage consolidation, backup planning, and many more. Sharing about its success story, Murali explained one of its major solution deployments in a leading corporate house in Tamil Nadu. Precision has successfully implemented Business Continuity in the concerned company. The solution has been extended using host-based replication solution from HP (Storage Works Storage Mirroring) deployed between the primary site and the secondary site. The replication is enabled on a Heterogeneous Hard Ware with the primary site with a SAN storage and disaster site with a SAN storage array. The business continuity is enabled with a lesser RPO with the disaster site getting enabled without manual intervention. Precision has extended the end-to-end sizing at the primary and disaster site, and deployed the same using end-to-end HP products. The DR replication can also be managed with the proposed solution extending the customer to check on the replicated data instantaneously. The core business objective of the customer is met with the proposed solution utilizing the existing resources effectively.

According to Precision Infomatic, the Indian consumers in the storage space are evolving fast and demand to have in total control of the devices they use. Also, they want their devices to be connected with each other for a complete digital environment. They just do not want to store data; they want to access it on the go. Talking about Precision Infomatic's strategy of betting big in the storage market, Murali said, “The Indian storage peripherals market has recorded good growth this year too, and we expect to maintain the trajectory in 2011. Holding on to the convictions of consumption pattern of storage technology in the Indian context, and being on the pulse of the consumers' needs and preferences, we are able to tap a huge demand in the market and have also managed to successfully play a significant role in defining the evolution of storage devices.”

Going forward, Precision Infomatic further aims to drive the demands and is looking at the best supply growth. “We are certain that the demand will be in good balance during the course of the coming fiscal,” said the confident Murali. Another solution provider, which saw a huge demand in the storage market in India, is Pune-based Shro Systems. Sailing through the wave of success, in the last few months, the company got four major storage projects-server virtualisation with 80 TB storage, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), servers refresh and storage for Microsoft Exchange 2010 implementation. Explaining about these projects, Anirudh Shrotriya, CEO of Shro Systems said, "All these projects served different types of needs, and it shows how the demand of storage space has been growing extensively.”

According to the solution provider, the first project is about virtualizing more than 2,000 test and development servers in phases. In the second project, the case is about customer wanting to go for 200 virtual desktops for their training and development needs. In the third project, customers wanted to refresh their large quantity of servers and virtualise them, and were looking for flexible and scalable solution as the number of servers was supposed to increase in future. The last project was about customers moving from Linux-based mailing solution to a Microsoft solution. And there were roughly 400 users and they were looking for a dependable and reliable storage box to host these mail boxes.

Also, the Mumbai-based Micropoint has built new success path in the storage market in India. Pranav Vyas, Director-Technical, Micropoint Computers, said, “The market is moving towards high capacity in portable data storage due to several factors, which include increasingly larger work files; digital data-enabled consumer devices and the Internet.” He also opined that the virtual storage will make its presence in cloud computing and virtualization space.
Highlighting some of its successful solution deployments in the Fiscal year 2009-10, Vyas explained about the deployment of C7000 Enclosure, BL860 Blades, EVA64000, MSL8096, HP network Switches and Dataprotector in a leading pharma manufacturing company ,where the solution provider worked with customer for their ERP deployment right from initial stage of user profiling for SAP till the implementation. “We initiated the entire sizing for 37000 SAP users and the major challenge in the solution deployment was that customer had multiple locations across 16 countries. In this sizing activity, we took utmost care of IOPS sizing as along with factored SAP users their were seven other existing applications, which were to be virtualized and deployed on same storage. We not only covered the primary site but we also sized the DR for this solution.”

Also, the Indore-based Veltronics India, has received a huge response for its storage solutions. According to Sanjeev Gupta, CEO, Veltronics India, the company developed its own OMR software, which is today used by most of the major coaching institutes in the state and professional tutorials across the country. The company has around 30—35 customers for this product. It has also partnered with IBM for servers and storage solutions. Gupta said, “The company takes utmost care in recommending the right products to customers.” Also, the company launched a smart card. The size of a credit card, it has an embedded silicon chip that enables it to store data and communicate via a reader with a workstation or network. The chip also contains advanced security features that protect the card's data. The inherent advantages of smart cards as instruments to carry information, securely, and enable transactions, enable the technology to be exploited by the Army.

Even Mumbai-based Rashi Peripherals has witnessed a decent growth pace in the storage space. Rajesh Goenka, VP-Sales and Marketing, Rashi Peripherals is of the view that today in the storage sector, there is huge demand from SOHO as well as corporate segment and keeping that in mind we would like to focus more on storage in 2011. “Storage will be one of the key drivers in near future and a game changer for many,” he said.

Throwing light upon the company's successful solution deployments in the storage sector, Goenka said that Rashi Peripherals has recently deployed Netgear NAS at various educational and SMB type of industries. One such example is to Scientific Publishing. It's an e-publishing company and they deal in storage, they convert the language into local script. Currently, we have storage solution upto 24TB. Also, the company has launched Sony range of internal Blu-ray drives, which can write almost 50GB of data in a single BD disk. Since as the BD disk prices are dropping, this is also now getting very popular in small and medium enterprises. He said, “Since we get a larger chunk of revenues from the SMB type of industries, we will continue to focus on and small enterprises and also the educational institutes to get higher share of business.”

The Champ

Considering the success paths trodden by the active game changers, Precision Infomatic is indeed a remarkable success story in India's storage market. Stressing on the need to identify challenges in its way and cashing on them, the solution provider has shaped its unbeaten position. Precision Infomatic clearly defines that winners are not born are ones who rise up to a challenge and lead. A proper integration of technology and talent has helped accelerate the pace of innovation within Precision Infomatic. Betting big in the storage market, the company is looking forward to expand its offerings beyond the traditional customer-supplier relationship.

Sikta Samantaray
(siktas@cybermedia.co.in)