Bollywood gospel says: no film starring Big B would ever be a flop. Storage is the Big B to the enterprise infotech market. The sector revenues seem to be immune to any southward movement. The growth is average in some years-even that rivals overall industry growth-while in others, its rise is meteoric.

FY 2005-06 was one such year of stupendous growth. All segments, be it external storage including network storage, secondary storage including tape drives and tape automation, or storage software, registered impressive growth. Since the dynamics of all three segments are completely different, it makes little sense to collate the overall storage figure. Instead, it will be more appropriate to analyze how each market grew separately and the lack of vendors operating in all three segments. Other than HP and IBM, and to some extent Sun (following the StorageTek acquisition), no vendor covers the turf completely.

External storage grew by 39% while storage software grew by 38%. For software, this is understandable considering its low base. That external storage with a significantly high base of Rs 565 crore in FY 2004-05 could record this high growth is quite amazing. Secondary storage registered a more conservative growth of 11%, though to be fair, exact data in this category is not available. This might explain the drop in the growth rate by a couple of points from that of FY 2004-05.

SAN's Phenomenal Growth
The external storage market owes its massive upsurge in revenues to the phenomenal 85% growth in the networked-storage category. The SAN market skyrocketed at 90% to reach Rs 449 crore, while even the 68% growth in NAS revenues merited headlines. This euphoria about SAN/NAS means the good old external DAS is to perdition. It might be a bit premature to write its epitaph with a Rs 208-crore revenue in FY 2005-06. Yet, two consecutive years of negative growth-this time down by 18%-shows that Indian enterprises have finally matured to migrate from DAS to NAS or SAN, or increasingly, to a combination of both.

Fiber Channel (FC) SAN, long regarded as expensive by most Indian enterprises, became the frontrunner in enterprise storage for block-level storage access requirements. More than 90% of the SAN deployments during FY 2005-06 belonged to the fiber channel category. The impetus came, as expected, from banks and telcos. And considering the mission-critical data run by banks and telcos, fiber channel SAN became its preferred option.

While 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps FC SANs were already available, FY 2005-06 saw the emergence of the 4 Gbps variety, doubling the speed of the existing standard. And there was only a marginal price difference, with 4 Gbps coming at no more than 10% premium over the 2 Gbps price.

Most large data centers, such as Reliance's in DAKC and VSNL's in Navi Mumbai, opted for 4 Gbps FC SAN as it suited their need for high-speed data replication. On the flip side, there were problems in its full adoption as all the front- and back-end components needed to be 4 Gbps-compliant. There were 4 Gbps arrays available in the market, but only for the front end. This year vendors are expected to come out with 4 Gbps drives too.

IP SAN generated a lot of hype. It was mostly popular with SMBs and at DR sites. Since it ran on existing LAN and hardware, setting it up was cheap, as it eliminated the cost of host-bus adapter and management. Despite the hype, the IP SAN market was miniscule contributing around Rs 20 crore in FY 2005-06.

Intransa, a niche player, did 33 installations during the year. Even NetApp saw a five-fold increase in adoption. Large enterprises went for IP SANs for departmental branches and offices in remote locations. However, all were unanimous that IP SAN's overwhelming popularity was premature. The adoption base was pretty low to make any major assessment. Then again, most of it was for non-critical applications where parameters like performance and response times are not important.

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