Michael D Eisner, chairman and CEO, Walt Disney Company says "The Internet needs content and it needs more of it every day. The fact is that nobody signs up for the Internet due to the elegance of its Cisco routers. Nobody logs on because of the Intel chip inside. No, they use the Internet in ever-growing numbers because of the content. Right now that content is largely information. But increasingly, it will also be entertainment". This clearly sums up the need for storage. And India would be no different. According to an IDC report, the total storage market in the country was of the order of 1,041 TeraBytes (TB) in 2000. Meaning, we have already crossed the age of terabytes and stepped in PetaBytes (PB). This has been one of the most significant achievements, living in the world of PB shipments. In terms of revenue, the Indian marketplace saw a spending of over Rs 607.7 crore. This is just the beginning.

The Indian Market Place

There are two types of architectures—direct attached and network attached. And they can be either modular or centralized. Believes Binod Panda, country manager, Apara Enterprise Solutions Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, a company that has been one of the earliest evangelists in the promotion of storage solutions in the country, "Customers will still need a mix of these or either one of these. Network attached modular storage is getting more popular and will be the trend in future. We are seeing more and more customers preferring networked storage. It’s either NAS or SAN, as customers are looking at storage consolidation". The spending pattern in the market in the previous calendar year, confirms this. Though Direct Attached Storage (DAS) accounted for the largest market share that is close to 70 percent, Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Area Storage (NAS) solutions, finally, seemed to have caught up with corporates. According to the IDC market findings, SANs and NAS in 2000 accounted for Rs 50 crore approximately in value, and this is going to go up considerably. IDC forecasts that while SANs will constitute for 49 percent of India’s external storage systems revenue in 2005, NAS will be 32 percent. And during the period 2000 to 2005, the Indian disk storage system shipments are expected to grow at a CAGR of 95.2 percent to approximately 29.5 PB.

Storage is becoming very competitive. In fact, this market is more competitive than the server market. There are more than ten players who are offering their storage solutions in India and many more are eyeing the Indian market. With the recession in US, almost everybody is trying to get in to the Asian market, and India comes to mind first, for all of these players. Almost all the major players, be it software or box pusher, have set shop in the country. EMC, Hitachi, Quantum Snap Appliances, Tandberg, Veritas, Legato, Seagate, Sanrise and many more are found here. The enterprise business is still direct for most of the companies but to increase the focus and reach, many vendors are working on a channel strategy. This is to ensure a complete coverage. Says Louis Lye, business development manager, Asia-Pacific, Quantum Snap Appliances, "Our focus is on sizing up the market, and we continue using good partners to provide coverage and technical support". Invariably, this has been the trend on the overall strategy—partnering and extending good technical support. At the same time, spreading awareness on network storage was the focus. This is just the beginning.