Various estimates place the growth of storage market to about 60 to 80 percent year on year. If true, where is the demand coming from? The basic need to cope with data generation on a massive scale is the driving factor for storage. With data storage encompassing data consolidation, high availability, data integrity, manageability, scalability and interoperability in a bandwidth-constrained environment, storage solutions have been progressively evolving to suit customer needs.

Large enterprises have been the primary drivers for the growing Indian storage market, considering the amount of digital information they generate. The prevalence of the Internet is forcing enterprises to invest in their networks and IT infrastructure. Most enterprises run data-intensive applications like ERP and CRM with a high-accessibility rate, thus triggering the need for network storage. ERP and CRM have dominated the market, and data warehousing and data-mining have also started in a major way. Call center markets are focusing on India seriously and they would be generating a lot of data. Applications like Oracle and SAP, have fuelled this fire and this has been doubling year after year. Most of the companies are dependent on IT, and churn out data and reports on a regular basis. "Department of Space, weather bureau, research programs, R&D, video, audio are a few others who have contributed heavily", says Panda.

The demand will come mainly from enterprises operating in key verticals like telecommunications/media, finance, manufacturing and retailing, and of late, even the government sector. SMBs, though constrained for IT budgets, have realized the need for efficient data storage. There is also the software sector that depends hugely on data storage. Finally, the existence of data-intensive business entities like ASPs and IDCs depends on efficient storage systems. E-commerce has driven economies in to e-economies where data rates have grown more than ten folds.

India being a big region, it is imperative to have a channel strategy in place. Storage investment decisions! With the value of storage deals getting bigger ad, bigger decision will be taken, more at the CEO, COO, CFO and CTO levels. This is now treated as more of a corporate strategy and would need to involve the top management.

The Critical Success Factor: Though these trends are visible and technology available, "In India, specifically, corporates need to be educated on the need to have mission-critical information infrastructure that is available 24 x 7 and the role that storage infrastructure plays in making that happen. Thus, all the Indian corporates were procuring storage along with the servers, without considering the need for a unified information infrastructure", reiterates Ramana of Cisco. Intelligent storage is imperative when information needs are critical. The ability of storage to handle tasks, such as backup, recovery and disaster recovery is fundamental. He suggests. "An enterprise would require a multi-disciplinary team approach on how SAN technologies can be designed and implemented in their business environment. Another key area that needs to be addressed would be personnel skill development across multiple platforms for successful deployment. SAN network across a LAN is feasible today, while deploying them across Metropolitan Area Networks and Wide Area Networks would have significant bandwidth implications in terms of cost and availability. Options for an enterprise would be either to build or outsource the storage network to an Internet data center service provider".

The success factor would be how such storage service providers leverage their infrastructure to provide reliable, secure and cost-effective storage solutions to the enterprises. Vendors are giving more importance to services and support. So all the business models will evolve around services. In India, specifically, there will be a significant amount of alliances made, more to get market and service reach. "The storage market in India will grow tremendously as more and more organizations begin to realize the value of corporate information. Applying a networking model to storage environments has become a strategic necessity. Clearly, storage networking is the storage architecture of the future", reiterates Basu Hurkadli.

Ch. Srinivas Rao