At the centerpiece of any disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity management (BCM) plan lies the need to protect and fortify data in the event of a disaster. This is because today data lies at the heart of any 24x7x365 operation, which is what BCM is all about. The role of a storage system becomes more crucial in an organization when there is a need to protect information. Starting from ‘simple backups’ to ‘faster restores’, to high availability of data and application—storage systems have become a key component in any DR/BCM planning.

The extra demand for storage is generated on account of replication of data from the primary site to a remote location. A copy of production data is constantly maintained at the secondary site and in the event of a disaster, business operations are transferred to the secondary site. The first phase of replication is that of data, after which comes replication of processing power and the network.

In addition to the demand generated for more raw storage capacity, DR/BCM are also driving the market for storage-based disaster recovery software, as well as storage management software and storage services. Non-storage-based DR implementations involve basic server-based file transfers to remote locations, which is not really a foolproof way of implementing business-critical DR or business continuity.

Both DR and BCM are going to drive the market for large high-end projects in the storage segment. Increasingly, high-end projects, especially in SAN, will be coming from BCM in the future. The involvement is much more in BCM and the project implementation level is high. When you have to connect from one environment to another and across the country, it has to be project-driven. This growing trend will put an emphasis on service skills and not just on box-selling. In such a scenario, it is the storage vendors who will evolve an end-to-end robust storage solution. The quest for end-to-end capabilities will further drive greater solutions inter-operatability and technology tie-ups.

While generally there is a time lag of around 1–2 years between setting up of a primary data center and a secondary remote site, the coming year is going to see customers who are planning to go for their secondary set-up along with the setting up the primary site, which will further boost demand for storage.