Data storage continued to be an integral part of the IT industry and least affected by the general slowdown, as there was no let up in business spending on it both in India and worldwide

Driving storage
The drivers of increasing storage adoption remained more or less the same as last year, though this year saw the addition of a few more, chiefly due to the rapid expansion by telecom and BPO players.

Big projects by major telcos
drove the storage industry like no other, as they pushed demand for high-end storage equipment primarily to store user profiles and billing data. Similarly, criticality and sheer amounts of data being handled by contact centers necessitated matching investments into storage.

The ramifications of 9.11 still buzzed in CIO minds and many businesses increasingly took to disaster recovery and business continuity planning. While DR and BCP have been a buzzword for a few years now with many enterprises keen to adopt it, it was only in the last fiscal that funds started flowing into DR and BCP investments.

The need to have a sound DR plan was a critical factor for enterprises to go in for storage consolidation, much as it was a need to reduce storage manageability issues and costs. Last year’s trends were followed this fiscal too as enterprises pushed for storage consolidation.

DR planning and storage consolidation together drove the demand for network storage (SAN and NAS). Just like last year, continued explosion of data—resulting from applications in ERP, CRM and messaging—was another big driver for business adoption of networked storage during the fiscal.

The RBI mandate on data archival drove a huge investment by the banking and financial sector on archival solutions, and of course, primary networked storage to begin with. As even nationalized banks began offering applications like real-time Internet banking, need for ramped up data storage infrastructure became imperative.

Continued price cuts announced quarter after quarter by storage equipment vendors brought storage within the reach of many SMEs as well, and this factor pushed volumes growth like nothing else. By the end of the year equipment costs were down roughly by 30-40% over the previous year (IDC estimates).

As data grew in size and storage infrastructure in complexity, the need to have a simpler and easy to manage infrastructure drove the storage software industry in a big way. Software began to be viewed by enterprises as a front-end for managing entire storage infrastructure from a central place, especially for applications in automatic backup and disaster recovery.

The inhibitors
Though there was little holding back the onward march of the storage industry, what could have been a spectacular performance was inhibited by a few niggling roadblocks. Even though the prices crashed, in the wake of shrinking IT budgets the biggest thing on CIOs minds was RoI. Sales were difficult to achieve as CIOs were increasingly concerned with total cost of ownership and RoI figures. The factor applied mostly to costly infrastructure like SAN and remote data replication.

The lack of interoperability and backward compatibility among storage hardware also kept many enterprises from investing in new technology. The only option served to them was total migration, which not many businesses were keen to implement.