Storage Software: Going Strong
Though it did not match the growth rate of network storage or secondary storage, at 40% even the storage software market showed impressive growth to reach Rs 185 crore. And, in many cases, with vendors selling software as part of their storage boxes, it was difficult to accurately estimate the overall numbers. Continued customer spending on software for data protection, storage resource management and compliance helped to drive this positive growth during 2005-06. Spending growth related to data protection, including replication, backup, and archive software, was an indicator of customers continued concerns about application availability, data management, and business continuity. This best exemplified the stupendous growth witnessed in storage replication software during the year.

Symantec continued to rule the roost. Thanks to the products from the erstwhile Veritas stable, it led the market with a wide margin. And, incidentally, it was the pure-play storage vendors like EMC, HDS and NetApp who occupied the next few slots. Backup and archival software still enjoyed the lions share of the overall storage software market. However, storage replication software and storage resource management categories showed more impressive growth figures during the year. Storage software was, incidentally, one of the strongest performers in the overall IT market as a result of increased interest in data protection and tighter legislation around data storage

The reliance on business-critical applications was driving enterprises to deploy and maintain complex and expensive storage infrastructures. For todays distributed large enterprise, managing the data explosion, having visibility into how the data is being used and by whom, ensuring continuous business operations, and allowing for efficient access to data from remote offices has become more critical than ever.

The need for continuous data availability across a diverse infrastructure with different standards and technologies increased the cost of manageability challenging enterprises who have already been struggling to lower the total cost of ownership. The emergence of new business models demanding non-stop application availability made organizations also feel the need for storage management solutions, such as Storage Resource Management (SRM), SAN Management etc to ensure that end users can work uninterrupted.

Rajneesh De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in

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