Tiered Storage, Archiving: Top Choices Of Enterprises

Natarajan Viswanathan, MD, Hitachi Data Systems, shares his perspective on the Indian storage landscape with Biztech2.0.

What is your view on the alignment of IT with business?

In today’s scenario, the alignment of IT with business is paramount and this is the problem that most CIOs are busy solving. In my opinion, business was not as complex ten years back as it is today. As business today is a lot more complex and competitive, IT has to constantly re-invent itself.

Can you shed some light on the evolution of storage?

One part of the IT infrastructure is storage. People are willing to invest and are looking at efficient and quality solutions from vendors. Not all storage that is bought is used completely. Also, budgets are not growing; they are either the same or are being slashed. In a scenario where you just look at raw storage, it is definitely not going to be possible to make do with such budgets, however, when you look at combining the storage with solutions, it is definitely going to be possible.

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Which are the most popular storage solutions being adopted by Indian companies?

Indian companies today are looking at the basics of storage management. What is going to play a critical role is the sudden burst of unstructured data that we see emerging and these are not databases or files; it is data coming in from various areas such as data from online transactions online or e-mails. The two common solutions that we see being used include tiered storage and archiving.

Which new verticals are adopting storage solutions aggressively?

If you look at some of the new segments such as media, which includes companies that do digital imaging, make digital movies, store movies because they have rights over them for more than 25 years and they might have to make them ‘live’ at any point, you will understand the huge storage needs felt by players in this sector. Media is one sector that is aggressively adopting storage solutions as its storage requirements are huge and important to the business.

What is your take on compliance and the issues associated with it?

Suddenly, compliance has become very important in India because there are guidelines from SEBI, which can be equated with the SOX guidelines in the US. Then there is BASEL II, which again brings in compliance. Business is becoming more complex and compliance is making it mandatory to store data over longer periods of time.

What is your view on storage virtualisation in the SME sector?

There are some SMEs that adopted storage at an earlier stage and have already deployed multiple storage solutions. Today, they feel the pinch because everything is on a different platform and they don’t have a common solution to stitch it all together. This is also becoming a hurdle on the path leading to their adoption of virtualisation. As a result, few such SMEs are now considering virtualisation. Even amongst enterprises, what the customer is doing in India is just about understanding virtualisation. In terms of virtualisation being full-blown and a must-have kind of a solution, we are about three quarters away. Nevertheless, people are looking at it very seriously and understanding the various aspects.

What is your take on green IT?

As far as green IT is concerned, there needs to be a lot of education delivered. People need to understand that the business should not only be profitable but also environment friendly. In some of the more developed countries, there are government legislations in place that put demands on the business in terms of the standards that it maintains with reference to the environment. In India, we still haven’t got to that stage but at the end of the day, I think education will help and also people must commit to becoming truly green.