COVER STORY
STORAGE MANAGEMENT
“SMARTER STORAGE IS NECESSARY FOR BUSINESSES TO STAY AHEAD AS DATA CONTINUES TO EXPLODE—TO 2.7 ZETTABYTES IN 2012, UP 48 PERCENT FROM 2011.” KAMAL SHARMA, GROUP CIO AND ITIM SBU HEAD, MINDLANCE
alization of both server and storage is predictable and will continue to be a biggest market for the vendors, more than any other technology.” With faster growth rates of data, de-duplication at source and destination is catching up big time to optimize data volumes. “We see increasing trend in deployment of HA/DR for business applications to ensure business continuity/availability. RBI regulations are driving adoption of DR in BFSI vertical. With eGovernance rolling out new services regularly DR has become a basic need here too. Internet commerce is picking up steam off late which is also driving HA/DR in a big way,” responds Sunil Pillai, Co-Founder and MD, iValue InfoSolutions Pvt Ltd. Virtual environments are gaining prominence owing to the flexibility, augmented utilisation levels & TCO that they offer. Businesses can accelerate their recovery time by storing machine images & recovering the set up from the same. The cloud is becoming more real as an option recently. SaaS (Software as a Service) and from a DR perspective – DRaaS (DR as a Service) & RaaS (Recovery as a Service) are being evaluated more seriously. Narayana Menon, Lead – Marketing, Asia-Pac and Middle-East, Sanovi Technologies, explains, “A
typical DR as a service offering has a subscription based fees that includes infrastructure and operations and a SLA associated with it and this model is quite attractive especially to the SMB/E segments though most organisations would experiment with their non-mission critical data to be put on the cloud & I believe that it would take some more time for organisations to completely base their data storage, back up & DR on the cloud.” He also sees a clear move from tape to disk backup which is witnessing a growth of 50% yearover year, despite the fact that more than 70% of the large organisations still use tape to some extent. It is estimated that only about 20% of disasters are natural while 80% are due to human/system error. He suggests that automating and managing back up and DR effectively would be the key to reducing dependency on large team of experts to do the job in turn benefit the organisation with heightened recovery readiness at lower TCO. While Dell-Sonicwall considers NAS appliances becoming cloud storage gateways, as one of the most important enterprise trends. “NAS filers are still as fundamental to today’s business processes as networking, phones, and printers so we
“WITH EGOVERNANCE ROLLING OUT NEW SERVICES REGULARLY DR HAS BECOME A BASIC NEED HERE TOO. INTERNET COMMERCE IS PICKING UP STEAM OFF LATE WHICH IS ALSO DRIVING HA/DR IN A BIG WAY,” SUNIL PILLAI, CO-FOUNDER AND MD, IVALUE INFOSOLUTIONS PVT LTD.
“ITS REAL TIME COMPRESSION TECHNOLOGY CLAIMS TO COMPRESS DATA REAL TIME TO 50% OF ITS SIZE.” ARPITA SENGUPTA, PRODUCT MANAGER (HIGH END STORAGE SYSTEMS, INDIA SOUTH ASIA), IBM
do not see the concept of file sharing going away this year. However there are definitely movements afoot to change how file sharing is delivered in enterprises and unstructured data is stored. This transition from NAS filers being delivered as purpose-built appliances to cloud storage gateways is the first and biggest step toward making this reality,” explains Chanda Ramakrishna, National Distribution Manager, Dell SonicWALL India Next in line is Archiving, which he says will move out of the back alleys and into the main stream. Calling it almost inextricably linked to the first trend, he mentions vendors are often convinced of the value of archiving, but continually fail to take into account is that it is the users who are the ones who have to ultimately manage archiving, not them. Next on his list is Backup Appliances. As the consumerization of enterprise IT is well under way and organizations are becoming more inclined to buy a preconfigured appliance that has the backup software and hardware they need as one. End of backup accompanied by the beginning of recovery forms the last trend. “Backup to disk, deduplication and the growing use of snapshots and replication software are resulting in fundamental changes to how users view the backup and recovery process.”
42 SME CHANNELS SEPTEMBER 2012
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