Year 2001-02 saw storage requirements expanding on one hand and IT budgets getting squeezed on the other. The size of the total Indian storage market in terms of volume was approximately 1,700 TB. This was a growth of 70 percent in terms of volume.

Direct attached storage (DAS) predominates the Indian storage market, with a market share of 74 percent. This, however, is less than its 80 percent share in 2000-01. Storage area network (SAN) and network area storage (NAS) accounted for 16 percent and 10 percent of the market share respectively. The reasons for slow migration of enterprises to network storage include cost and implementation-related issues, poor client awareness and the pressure to justify RoI.

The storage software market is valued at Rs 73.5 crore, a growth of 70 percent over the previous year. HP-Compaq at 63 percent accounted for the biggest market share in the hardware space, followed by IBM, Sun, and Network Appliances.

While there were a lot of activities happening on the storage hardware front, the storage software front also witnessed a flurry of activities, with quite a few vendors establishing or augmenting their marketing activities in India. Besides established players like Computer Associates, other players began to put India on their map of operations. While vendors like Brocade established their presence in India, Veritas set up its marketing activities, previously it just had a development center here.

In late 2001, virtualization emerged as a buzzword with most vendors announcing their plans and unveiling their strategies of management software. At the fabric and router levels, the players are HP-Compaq and Brocade. Veritas has moved virtualization into the fabric level for NAS and SAN from the host level. Players at the host or server-based levels are Sun, CA, IMB, EMC, Compaq, and HP. Virtualization is said to realize the full potential of a SAN and NAS environment. There are vendors offering solutions for NAS. For the SMEs, virtualization in a NAS environment is possible but not with DAS. Storage virtualization is yet to make way into India.

Enterprise storage solutions are generally more complex and extensive and are used by large and medium organizations. As SMEs move up the value chain in terms of intelligent use of information, they will be forced to consider the use of intelligent enterprise storage.

Banking and insurance, telecom, and energy segments, are witnessing an exponential increase in their storage requirements and are shifting to a network storage environment.

EXPERTS PANEL Agendra Kumar, country manager, Veritas Software Arun Rao, national manager (storage business), CA P K Gupta, director strategic development (intercontinental operations), Legato Systems Simon Harvey, MD—APAC (storage solutions group), Quantum Corporation T Srinivasan, country manager, EMC Vikas Nandalal, sales specialist and product manager (storage services), Tata Internet Services

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