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Users are increasingly turning to technologies such as thin provisioning |
| In an exclusive interview to Dataquest Anand Naik, Director of Systems
Engineering for India and SAARC region, Symantec Corporation talks
about the state of the Network Storage market and Symantec's role and position
|
| Shrikanth G |
| Thursday, June 11, 2009 |
Header: “Users are increasingly turning to technologies such
as thin provisioning” – Anand Naik, Symantec
In an exclusive interview to Dataquest Anand Naik, Director of Systems
Engineering for India and SAARC region, Symantec Corporation talks
about the state of the Network Storage market and Symantec’s
role and position. Excerpts:
How do you characterize the performance of Network Storage market
during 2008-09?
In 2008, demand in the Indian storage market was driven largely by
enterprise system upgrades and e-governance projects, followed by the
momentum in the SMB market. A lot of enterprises that implemented
enterprise systems such as ERP went in for upgrades last year which led
to a good demand for storage. Another significant development last
fiscal was the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies - which started finding
way into enterprises that are extremely storage intensive. Considering
the interactivity of these technologies and their ability to allow
multi-way communication, they can bring about multi-fold increase in
the data generated by enterprises.
Symantec per se can you talk about the major developments and your
Network Storage revenues for 2008-09?
In FY 08, technologies around business continuity planning (BCP)/
disaster recovery storage consolidation, virtualization, tiered storage
and data de-duplication kept the momentum going. In addition, there was
also a significant movement toward greening of the IT Data center that
impacted solutions across both primary and secondary storage.
Data de-duplication, a technology that Symantec has been evangelizing
for quite sometime now, continues to create a buzz in the Indian
market, considering it helps save on the space actually used in the
storage environment. In 2008-09 tiered storage generated a lot of
interest, driven by the need to save costs. Our 2008 State of the Data
Center report’s India findings revealed a whopping 80% of
Indian respondents pegged reducing costs and ‘doing more with
less’- a key objective this year.
Enterprises are realizing storage need not be completely online.
Companies started creating tiered storage architecture, whereby they
started provisioning data to online or offline storage depending on the
criticality of the application. This, in turn, helped the market for
secondary storage while helping the customers cut costs.
Symantec’s leadership position in the overall storage
software market is further strengthened by IDC’s Worldwide
Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, March 2009 that indicate while
other vendors either lost market share or made only a slight gain in
2008, Symantec captured 18.2% of the overall storage software market.
Symantec also remains the market share leader in key IDC storage
software categories: Data protection and recovery software, with 33.8%
revenue share - nearly three times that of it’s the
next-largest competitor. Storage infrastructure software, with 28.3%
revenue shares in 2008-ahead of the leading storage software vendors.
Can you talk about some of the significant customer wins in Network
Storage for Symantec in India during 2008-09?
Symantec's expanded position as a leader in the storage software market
attests to the performance of our broad portfolio of solutions and our
commitment to serving the needs of customers. Symantec delivers a
comprehensive family of storage products that enable companies to
ensure the availability of their business-critical data.
Although we are not in a position to disclose customer details, we can
definitely say that the reason why customers choose to be with Symantec
because with our storage management solutions, businesses can
standardize and automate the management of heterogeneous storage
platforms to maximize storage utilization, increase IT responsiveness,
and lower infrastructure and operational costs. Symantec data
protection solutions enable businesses to prepare for and recover both
data and systems in instances of equipment failure, accidental loss of
data, or a disaster.
Going forward what is your outlook on network storage?
We see enterprises driving towards modernization of storage as IT
departments struggle to stay within backup windows and meet recovery
point objectives and recovery time objectives. Storage management
software such as archiving and storage virtualization features that
assists organizations in automating IT policies will be of prime
importance this year. Users are increasingly turning to technologies
such as thin provisioning to make better use of existing storage. Thin
provisioning gives organizations the ability to deploy 'thin' storage,
reclaiming storage during online migrations and driving operational
efficiency.
Enterprises need to seriously look at upgrading their disaster recovery
plans as well as acquire newer recovery technologies to ensure
recoveries occur on a timely basis. Our State of the Data Center report
revealed enterprises utilize only 53% of their storage which is like
paying almost twice as much for storage needed Therefore, organizations
need to optimize and managing available storage resources. Enterprises
need to also incorporate a comprehensive data protection strategy in to
their IT strategy irrespective of backing up data to tape or disk. In a
nutshell, any successful data protection strategy should incorporate
all three elements that are: backup, archive and recovery.
Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in
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