“India is emerging as a backup location for MNCs worldwide”

Anthony Chan, director & general manager, Network Storage Solutions, Enterprise Storage and Servers Group, Asia-Pacific, and Subroto Das, director of Product Management, Asia-Pacific, Network Storage Solutions at Hewlett-Packard talk to PRASHANT L RAO on the drivers for the storage market in India and the Asia-Pacific. They also discuss how storage as a utility is available but there are no takers yet, though there is a lot of interest

What’s the role of IP in storage?

Anthony Chan (AC): As the price of storage is going down, demand is permeating down to the low-end of the market. SMEs want cheap storage and IP in storage can help bridge demand in the low-end of the market. The intent of iSCSI is to create a total solution that bridges WAN and SAN. MNCs that still have departmental storage and need centralisation [will find iSCSI useful.]

Subroto Das (SD): Our first product prototypes in this area are ready. We expect demand for these products to peak in 12 to 18 months.

Is storage as a utility available? Are customers buying into this concept?

SD: We are able to provide storage as a utility. Australia is aggressively [adopting this concept] while India hasn’t even started. A number of Asia-Pacific countries are in a transition phase. Demand hasn’t risen in the APAC though there are a lot of queries. Customers prefer to buy storage outright or finance it through deferred payments.

Is a particular set of applications driving the storage market? How about emerging markets for enterprise storage products?

AC: Bioscience and healthcare are the new segments driving storage in the Asia-Pacific market. Demand for DR solutions is growing in India. India is emerging as a backup location for MNCs worldwide, especially Bangalore. From nearline and offline we’re now talking about real-time. That will be the next evolution in IT storage.

SD: The basic driver is growing requirements. In some segments this is faster—the storage requirement of telecom or service providers grow faster on an average than that of manufacturing companies. The financial segment is growing fast, driven by the need for analysis and customer service. Data mining is driving the Australian market.

AC: There’s a lot of demand from the oil and gas industry for upstream work (exploration and production). They need to archive seismic data and locate sources of oil. It started ramping up in the mid-1990s and hasn’t peaked. Data storage is needed to optimise refining processes for downstream work (oil refining and distribution).

There’s tremendous demand for online capacity for data mining. Capacities for data mining can be as low as 5 TB and they can go up to 30 TB.

What’s the difference between HP’s storage virtualisation technology and IBM’s storage on Demand or Sun’s N1?

SD: We offer the same hardware as IBM, the same SAN switches from Brocade and McDATA. We have a better virtualisation solution. HP is moving virtualisation technology from the appliance to the switch. To put it another way, we are enabling the switching portion of the SAN fabric to be virtualised. In software we are ahead of the competition in terms of managing a suite of virtualised hardware (tape, disk, switches, appliances) using OpenView.

Our CASA box (a Proliant server with special firmware and I/O cards) interconnects hardware from various vendors. We’ve sold a number of CASA units in the Asia-Pacific. VersaStor enabled switches are in the labs, we have teamed up with Brocade for this. These will be virtualisation-enabled switches.

Software is playing a bigger role in storage. Is this a trend?

Customers have too much of [hardware]. They need to unify [these boxes], centrally manage them and set up DR sites. The value of software is an upcoming trend. We have good equity there through OpenView for storage area management and OpenView builder. Builder lets organisations detect new boxes, allocate storage, conduct performance analysis and optimise storage allocation.