Network Appliance: Network Appliance has more than 100 installations of its filers in India. It has been the dominant player in NAS. "Our major customers are Texas Instruments, Rediff, Times Internet and Cadence, to name a  few. A complete storage solution includes primary storage, tape libraries, storage management software, etc. We partner with the industry leaders to deliver a complete solution", says George Thomas, country manager, Network Appliance. It has recently announced to enter into high-end filers, with the launch of its first multiprocessor storage appliances, the NetApp F880 and F880c, which are claimed to be ideal for large databases, ERP, corporate-wide home directory consolidation, and other mission-critical applications.

Quantum (Snap Appliances): Snap Appliances, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Quantum Corp., manufactures the Snap Server workgroup NAS appliances. This product of storage appliances deliver file-serving solutions for the small-to-medium business and large corporate workgroup markets, offering affordable, multi-platform file-sharing support. Explains Louis Lye, business development, Asia-Pacific, Quantum Snap Appliances. "We expect the market to skew towards broader classification of enterprise, mid-range, and workgroup, as more NAS products appear. Our focus is on  sizing the market and continue using good partners to provide coverage and technical support. This will not change for Quantum. We are selling the storage solutions through channels".

StorageTek: StorageTek delivers a broad range of storage solutions for digitized data. It is in virtual storage solutions for tape automation, disk storage systems, and storage networking. It recently unveiled new virtual disk offering StorageTek V960 Shared Virtual Array disk subsystem. "When companies invest in technology, they look for sound RoI, and StorageTek continues to address this in the storage marketplace through our strong commitment to R&D", said Andy Srinivasan, managing director, StorageTek South Asia. In storage networking, it has products like SN 1500/2000 fiber channel hubs, StorageNet 3250 fiber channel router, StorageNet 6000 storage domain managers, and the 4100 switch series, among others.

Sun Microsystems: "Our strategy has been focused. Our storage solutions are offered through channels. The strategic push is to provide end-to-end switched fiber storage architecture with extreme scalability, high availability, reliability and simplified open storage management with Jiro. The global move of the storage players like striking alliances, evolving products towards open systems, and announcing new products to tap markets in which they were present sparsely, continues to be the order of the day," says B Chandrasekhar, regional storage product manager, network storage, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd. The global pact between Sun and Hitachi Data Systems is a significant development. Sun’s extensive sales force will augment high-end storage. It will sell and support the new Sun StorEdge 9900 series, which is based on the Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9900 products, extend the Sun StorEdge T3 arrays in direct attach storage and SAN environments with a high-end product for the data center. Additionally, Sun’s strategic focus is to make the StorEdge 9900 series the leader in performance for enterprise-class Solaris servers.

Legato: The bottomline as PK Gupta, director of engineering, Legato Systems India, puts is that storage is now a part of every IT manager’s planning.  Expenditure is going up in storage, every quarter.  Companies are seriously looking at SAN and NAS, although lot of knowledge is required.  They are also looking at their storage investment protection in the long-term.  All the major storage vendors perceive India as the big market potential and pushing storage products.  People are talking about iSCSI, Storage over IP, Infiband, Virtual Interface, Storage Resource Management (SRM), storage virtualization and finally, storage consolidation."