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Storage has been one sector that has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years. Till a few years ago, most vendors like IBM or HP were not even reporting storage as a separate line of businessit was clubbed together with servers. However, thanks to the explosion of data and its corollary effects, storage has today emerged as one of the most happening and lucrative sectors in the Indian IT industry. The importance of storage got further reinforced during 2006-07, especially with pure-play vendors like EMC and NetApp emerging as market leaders, even as systems vendors IBM, HP and Sun provided stiff competition.

Storage Catalysts
The biggest catalyst to Indias storage story was definitely the exponential increase in the amounts of data being generated by Indian organizations of all hues and sizes. As per the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), during 2006-07 only India witnessed massive digitization of data records (95% of data generated by enterprises is in digital form these days) and that data was growing at the rate of 60% annually. The implementation of new business applications across verticals for improving productivity further fuelled data generation. This compelled most enterprises to go in for networked storage, as they wanted real-time data replication and backup. Business continuity planning, disaster recovery, and storage virtualization proved to be the three pillars on which the storage foundation was built.

The overall network storage market, constituted of SAN and NAS, grew by 63% to reach Rs 940 crore in 2006-07. Coming in the wake of an 85% increase in the previous year, the numbers confirmed the growing trend among enterprises, SMBs included, to adopt SAN or at least NAS, or a hybrid model of both. On the other hand, the traditional DAS market continued to shrink; in 2006-07, it fell for the third consecutive year, this time by 10% to reach Rs 188 crore. The growth in SAN/NAS numbers seen in conjunction with falling DAS numbers only reinforced the shift from direct attached storage to the networked mode. It was primarily the server vendors like IBM and HP who still kept the DAS flag flying during the year.

As a result, in the overall external storage sweepstakes EMC regained the 1 slot from HP; thanks to a still substantial DAS share, IBM finished a close second, while HP and NetApp were two other vendors enjoying the lions share of the market. And with Dell also reselling a slew of low-end EMC products, EMCs lead actually should have gone up by a few points more. Beyond the Big Four, however, there was a huge gap; Sun, Symantec (by sheer dint of storage software) and Hitachi Data Systems were the other players who made some mark during the year.

The explosion in unstructured data, e-mail (and attachments thereof) and database sizes, and the need to support multimedia content for internal and external audiences contributed to the growth of networked storage requirements at Indian enterprises. Additionally, there was an increase in the digitization of paper content in areas like e-Governance, document management, workflow automation which further fuelled the market.

Many Indian companies were also affected by compliance-based storage requirements. A tiered storage architecture allowed an organization to classify data according to its criticality. Depending on the criticality of data, organizations continuously fine-tuned their strategies. Many enterprises might not have gone for a full-fledged ILM strategy, but they at least started recognizing the information lifecycle and started linking their storage utilities to applications that enabled the control and intelligent management of information. Storage consolidation was also on the rise and an effective DR and BCP set-up were not just considered essential, but almost hygiene for running their businesses. Those large enterprises, which had already gone in for networked storage and storage consolidation, opted for advanced DR and BCP during 2006-07.

Moving Beyond Tradition
As organizations moved towards networked storage with an accumulated storage infrastructure, there was a need to consolidate storage and simplify storage infrastructure. Result: there was storage consolidation happening at different levels. There has been consolidation of connectivity options in a single storage appliance, be it fiber, iSCSI, FC or IP SAN. Security has been integrated into storage systems, as has authentication. There has been branch consolidation for file level storage to optimize bandwidth and consolidate servers at branches. Storage consolidation also helped organizations improve their storage capacity planning.

DR and BCP also moved beyond their traditional domains of BFSI and telecom, especially amongst the retail and R&D sectors. Words like RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) got added to the storage lexicon. RPO is the amount of data loss that a company can tolerate and RTO is how much downtime it can endure; obviously, these were more management decisions than really technology ones. These also depended on the type of industry segment that wanted to do DR for.

Enterprise Content Management also became important for enterprises in India during FY 07 driven by the unprecedented growth in data, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. It is estimated that of all enterprise information, over 80% of it was unstructured, and a bulk of it unmanaged. Regulations compelled organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. The few data theft scandals in the BPO industry have also made BPO players carefully analyze their data storage and security strategies.

IP-based storage too gained momentum in 2006-07 because of its strengths of cost, capacity, scalability and manageability, especially in the SMB sector. It helped in total network storage consolidation of storage resources at a lower cost and centralized the storage architecture. The introduction of IP to the storage networking industry was gradually transforming it from a closed and proprietary world to one which is open and based on industry standards with a strong pace of technology innovation. This shift was evident during the year.

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