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The triumvirate of compliance conformance, virtualization and information lifecycle management (ILM) has emerged as the most important trends defining the adoption of storage techniques by Indian enterprises. Compliance conformation finally came out of vendor marketing pitches in 2006 and started getting mainstream. The need for storing information for long periods and then retrieving it at short notice while adhering to regulations gave an impetus to the storage market around compliance. Almost all major storage vendors eyed this market as they considered it to be of huge potential for them. Many Indian companies with business dealings in the US have been mandated to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Basel II, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, EU Data Protection Act, HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11 (life sciences) and DoD 5015.2 (government). Though adherence to regulations is derived out of business needs rather than government edicts, the situation is changing as compliance regulations evolve.

Major storage vendors have designed a well-defined strategy to tap this emerging market. Demand for compliance-related solutions is on the rise, and growth is expected around storage solutions that cater to this need. The BFSI and telecom segments are expected to adopt newer compliance-based solutions in India. Many potential customers are seriously evaluating the need for such solutions as issues like corporate governance (which entails storing of data in a proper format) will be affecting companies. The recent introduction of the Cheque Truncation System by the Reserve Bank of India, which means storing the digitized images of cheques in a proper format, started to drive the adoption of compliance-based storage solutions in the country.

Enterprise content management also became imperative for enterprises in India, driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information which grew by approximately 50% during the year. Of all enterprise information, over 80% of it was still unstructured, and a bulk of it was not managed. Regulations compelled organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. The various data theft scandals in the BPO industry also made BPO outfits carefully analyze their data storage and security strategies. Hence, given the content management challenges, enterprises need to look at adopting well-defined and well-planned content management strategies in association with experts in the field.

Virtualization Reality
Many enterprises in India climbed into the bandwagon of storage virtualization in 2006. Storage virtualization as a concept has been existing for a long time, but started finding takers in India on a large scale. Storage pooling, data migration and replication were some of the virtualization technologies commonly used in SAN. The management of storage devices could be tedious and time-consuming. Storage virtualization helped the storage administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily, and in less time, by disguising the actual complexity of the SAN.

This was part of the trend towards utility computing. It included the server, OS, application, network and storage. Historically, storage has always been virtualized, as when a physical device is carved up into logical devices. Now there is virtualization across the storage systems into larger aggregated resources. Enterprises in India now need to store more information and more types of information than ever before. They also need to ensure that this information is safely retained for rapid recovery and better corporate governance. IT executives responsible for acquiring and maintaining the storage systems that hold all this information also face continued pressures to restrain spending and boost operational efficiency.

Enterprises started reflecting new concerns for simplicity, effective storage utilization, manageability, and availability of storage. Storage virtualization allowed IT departments to easily deploy tiers of storage based on specific application requirements for performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness. It facilitated unified data replication so that IT managers can easily migrate or move data between different types of storage, including legacy systems. It also helped to automate provisioning, expansion, and data protection tasks across heterogeneous storage systems to boost IT administrators' overall efficiency.

Virtualization in storage ensured maximum storage capacity utilization and kept business-critical data and mission-critical data in tiered storage. Virtual RAID, and virtual snapshot and snap clones automated arrays considerably. Broadly speaking, storage virtualization has resulted in better storage utilization. Enterprises have been able to save storage costs by increasing the utilization of their storage disks, which is a significant increase at more than 50%. BFSI, telecom and the energy verticals led the way in adoption.

ILM Provides Direction
Information Lifecycle Management or ILM has been another buzzword of storage vendors that too moved out of the hype cocoon during the year. ILM came up more as a market direction for storage. It was a direction that the entire storage industry started moving in, much as the case was with network storage over the previous two years. Implementing ILM means a lot of effort in identifying and categorizing business data which is often a specialist's job. Storage vendors therefore eyed revenues through consultation services for implementing ILM.

Enterprises gradually adopted ILM strategies to protect corporate and intellectual property information. Depending on the criticality of data, organizations keep on fine-tuning their strategies. Telecom, insurance, government institutes and banks were the main takers. ITC in Kolkata, Tata Elxsi for their visual computing lab in Bangalore, Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and Hutch across India are all now practicing different stages of ILM.

ILM is a process, which recognized that information has a lifecycle. It now links the storage utility to applications and enables the control and intelligent management of information. It also controlled the movement of data across storage technologies from high-performing disks to mid-range disk systems to tape to optical. ILM enabled intelligent index, search and retrieval of relevant information to comply with business policies and government regulations.

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