Precision Infomatic: Solution Champ for Storage

Digitally Yours

With convergence and the never-ending
surge in digital technologies, the solution providers are now driving
the growth in the storage space. 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 deduplication, 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 dataenabled 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 “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” V Murali, Precision
Infomatic 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.