Tapping the Tape Market
With regulations becoming mainstream in India too, Indian enterprises are now legally required to use formal data protection. No wonder, during 2006-07, they became increasingly concerned about archiving and protecting their data. Keeping this in mind, the archival value of tape drives became more important and also encryption of tapes for better data protection gained popularity. Longer shelf life and tape automation for faster backup and retrieval also kept the tape market going.

Growing compliance requirements and adherence to SLAs in case of outage ensured that simple tape backups did not cut the mustard any more. Which is why organizations looked at implementing sophisticated technologies such as snapshots, virtual tape and disk-based backups. The result was the secondary storage market growing by 69% to reach Rs 248 crore. In fact, this was the fastest growth rate in Asia-Pacific, followed by China and the Philippines. This was more a three-horse race with Quantum dominating the show followed by IBM and HP, respectively.

Tape capacity crossed one terabyte per tape in 2006-07. At the same time, ATA disk costs went down to match the price performance of tape, giving a boost to disk based backups. There was an increase in remote data replication and consolidated backups at a centralized location. Tapes still remained important for offsite storage, so the trend was of faster backup and retrieval to disk and from there to tape.

When it came to disks, the big growth opportunity was in the consumer electronics segment where the demand for media rich content was growing on account of high definition TV, mobile video and audio, gaming and personal media. The verticals that were driving growth in the secondary storage market were SMBs, government, mobile gaming and security. With the proliferation of online computer gaming portals, large amount of storage is required at the backend. Another segment with high traction was security, where large volumes of surveillance video were recorded and archived.

Though tapes emerged as an effective DR mechanism with tape encryption becoming common, disk-based backup found new applications in DR, imaging, document management, e-mail archiving, broadcasting, security surveillance and information warehousing. Indian companies realized that the way to shorten the backup window was in using disk-to-disk backup technology. Although tape continued to be a prime medium for long-term archival, backups were increasingly being taken onto disk.

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