• High availability n Speed of deployment

• Data integrity n Security

• Scalability n Ability to integrate with existing legacy systems

• Manageability n Interoperability

• Acquisition cost n Total cost of ownership

• Vendor reputation

The order of importance could vary depending on each enterprise and the nature of their businesses.

T Srinivsan, country manager, EMC

• Heterogeneous server and operating systems connectivity

• Manage unpredictable and continuously expanding storage allocation demands

• Data availability and integrity

• Consolidation and movement of data without downtime

• No schedule and unscheduled downtime for business-critical applications

• Online backup from storage—server and network less backup

• Enterprise-wide business continuity by disaster recovery by enterprise storage

• Information sharing between different servers and operating systems

• NAS and SAN support in the same storage for flexibility of future technology

• Common management for storage infrastructure

• Installed base of storage systems using selected servers and applications

Avijit Basu, marketing manager, (NSSO) business customer sales organization, HP

Today’s modern IT infrastructure has bigger challenges. The type of data is changing from simple application like e-mail text to rich media attachment. A two-hour normal NTSC video, 3D movie, a high-resolution color still photo or a two minute audio occupy from 20 MB to a few terabytes. Hence, data growth and managing is a big issue. Managing the infrastructure (which is growing tenfold) with the same people, is another challenge. How do you dynamically allocate data from one point of the infrastructure (where it is lying unutilized) to the other without changing the current environment? The customers are asking for Quality of Service, which means service level agreements have become more stringent. The distributed storage is making IT managers think of storage and backup consolidation. Staff shortage and the maintaining of trained staff are the other challenges that all CIOs/CTOs face today. Security is also a major issue, as people access more open networks.

Basu Hurkadli, country manager, system sales, IBM India

The most important feature is the vendor’s total product portfolio, as it helps you identify the best solution for your environment. Consider the vendor who provides all options customized to meet the customers application and environment, instead of opting for a vendor that provides only a product or a solution.

• Opt only for open standard-based products

• Vendors support strategy and SI expertise—look for vendors who have the expertise across multiple platforms—storage, networking and data management. This will ensure that you have no interoperability issues

• Decisions must not be based on hardware performance alone. Instead, opt for companies that have interoperability testing, and support services to advise and work with you through the entire implementation period and beyond

• Select the solution that offers investment protection for your existing infrastructure

• Give due consideration to the scalability aspect of the solution. Access the vendors’ future storage visions

• It is very important that the products you buy today, have a migration path to future generation technologies

• Do not focus on the initial hardware price/MB, while ignoring software prices or ongoing software maintenance charges

• Costs for future upgrades are sometimes not considered. The point is, be sure to focus on the total cost of ownership

• Look into the installed base of customers

• Predicting storage product performance before it is installed in an organization’s environment is rarely easy. Ask for a product demonstration or a site visit

• Price of hardware

• Vendors past experience

George Thomas, country manager, Network Appliance India

• Performance

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

• Interoperability in an open system environment. The primary driver for network storage is to ensure that customers are able to scale servers and storage, independently. The storage decision should not limit his choice of servers

• Reliability n Ease of deployment

• Application support n Scalability

• Disaster-recovery solution

Sharad Srivastava, country manager, Seagate India

• Ease- of-use (which include flexibility in configuration, maintenance, etc)

• Manageability n Scalability

• Availability n Security

• Performance n Ease of maintenance

• Reliability n Investment protection

• Return of investment

Ravi Shekhar Pandey