As the information requirements grow, one of the biggest challenges for enterprises today is to migrate and upgrade their storage infrastructure seamlessly. Janey of EMC feels that this is where solution providers play a critical role of helping enterprises protect their investments

The information deluge the world is witnessing today is making it imperative for organizations to redesign their IT strategy, putting information on the centerstage. Against this backdrop, some of the key storage technology trends that will continue to drive global markets include e-mail manage­ment whereby enterprises facing huge e-mail explosion will need to adopt effective e-mail management and archiving solutions.

There would also be a need for disaster recovery/business continuity strategies in the wake of terrorist threats, cyber crimes and increased occurrence of natural calamities like tsunami, hurricanes, floods and earth­quakes. With the memories of the earthquakes in China and Japan fresh in our minds, this point is highly underlined.

Information being the most critical asset, its security has emerged among the top five challenges that organizations are facing. Additionally, the com­panies that have large, diverse and complex environments are looking to simplify the manage­ment of these environments, and to implement storage virtualization solutions.

IP-based storage will gain momentum because of its strengths of cost, capacity, scalability and manageability especially in the SMB sector. IP SAN is a perfect solution for mid-tier organizations.

Rajesh Janey VP-Enterprise Business, India and Saarc, EMC

Enterprise content manage­ment has also become imperative for enterprises driven by the unprecedented growth in data including structured, semi-structured and unstructured information, which is estimated to grow approximately 50 percent per year. Of all enterprise information, over 80 percent is unstructured, 95 percent of which is not managed. There are reports, which show that employees can spend up to 40 percent of a workday looking for content and untangling issues with versio­ning, ownership and reformat­ting. These factors compel organizations to store and manage data securely giving rise to content management challenges.

Here comes CAS
In the coming days, regulatory and compliance pressures to archive data will drive the adoption of content addressed storage (CAS). When businesses have looked for fixed content storage solutions (representing more than 50 percent of the newly created data), they've faced a dilemma as there was a complete mismatch in what they need versus what the storage industry offers, while at the same time maintaining the cost effectiveness. CAS not only assures content integrity for long-term storage, but also guarantees that all data will remain unchanged over time.

Meanwhile, a host of international and Indian regula­tions have come into play that mandate specific policies and systems to be followed while engaging with multiple stake­holders. Each of these regulations has specific guidelines on the way data or information has to be managed, retained or protected.

As energy costs continue to rise and power grid capacity is pushed to the brink, energy provisioning and consumption are emerging as critical concerns for today's CIOs, IT adminis­trators, facility managers and even solution providers (SPs).

The genesis of all these technologies rests on the digital information deluge that the world is witnessing and increasing complexities of the same.

India challenge
Most companies do not have a proper information infras­tructure strategy in place. The information is stored in a random fashion where even the most unnecessary piece of data is put on to the high-performing system. This is a key issue of concern.

Another glitch is that most organizations rely on tape, as they have cost advantage over disk. But there are some common problems faced by companies using tapes such as long backup window, manual backup process and an unreliable medium of storage.

Underutilization of storage is another cause for concern. It is estimated that most customers are currently using only 30 to 40 percent of existing storage, as a lot of information is located in islands that are not networked together.

One of the biggest challenges is that enterprises should be able to migrate and upgrade their storage infrastructure seamlessly as their information requirements grow. This is where partners play a critical role of helping enterprises protect their investment. Regula­tory compliance issues are also posing challenges for enterprises to manage their corporate information to conform to these compliance policies.

The difficulty in effectively predicting growth and therefore ongoing disk requirements is another concern area. Many companies have inadvertently exacerbated the problem by building infrastructure on a piecemeal basis that depends largely on the quick deployment of off-the-shelf applications.

While this keeps initial spending low, it makes it more difficult to build a unified infrastructure in the long run. In a nutshell, the exponential information explosion, limited IT budgets, growth of data centric networks like ERP/SCM, growing regulatory environment are some of the factors that are fuelling the need for enterprises to go for information infrast­ructure solutions.

Market scenario
According to IDC, the external storage market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) stood at $1926.1 million in 2005, and is one of the fastest growing segments within IT, growing
at 10.4 percent CAGR from 2005 to 2010 timeframe in APEJ. India is one of the top three fastest growing markets for storage solutions in the APAC region.

IDC statistics indicate that the external storage market in India stood at $157 million in 2005, and this will be further augmented as the size of data is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.1 percent in the 2005 to 2010 timeframe.

Going forward, it will become imperative for busi­nesses to adopt information infrastructure solutions to extract maximum business value for their information assets, improve service levels, position their organizations for growth and change, comply with regulations and protect key information assets.

As businesses prepare to compete in the global economy, and derive maximum RoI from their existing technology investments, they will have to focus on building intelligent information infrastructures. This offers a huge opportunity for SPs, system integrators and channel partners to grow.

Subbalakshmi BM
subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in

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