Web 2.0 Apps Fuelling Storage Demand In Enterprise Markets

Pravin Desale, MD and VP, LSI Corporation (India), discusses the latest trends in the storage space with Biztech2.com.

What is the current situation in the storage market? Has it sprung back after the easing of the recession?

The demand for chips is no longer contracting as sharply as it did in the final months of 2008, when customers curtailed orders for new chips and focused on burning off existing inventories.

The SIA recently forecast a rebound in worldwide sales to begin in 2010, with a year-over-year growth of 6.5 percent to reach $208.3 billion. The market is seeing demand now as 80-90 percent of the necessary inventory correction has occurred and our business is definitely tightening up from a supply-demand standpoint. The need for storage continues to grow as does the data across telecommunications networks and infrastructure.

The spending of Indian enterprises on storage, back-up and recovery solutions is increasing due to the demand for additional storage capacity generated by new-gen applications plus growing concerns about disaster recovery and business continuity. Market estimates for storage solutions in India are said to be in the region of about $300 million, and the demand for storage solutions is constantly growing across all verticals.

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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 SME market. A lot of enterprises that had already implemented solutions 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. Web 2.0 apps are storage-intensive and have found their way into a lot of enterprises today. Considering the interactivity of these technologies and their ability to allow multi-channel communication, they are slated to bring about a multi-fold increase in the data generated by enterprises.

What are the trends in the storage and networking market at this point?

The 8Gbps Fibre Channel and Full Disk Encryption are some interesting trends. 8Gbps Fibre Channel reduces the new infrastructure costs by up to 45 percent as compared to the 4Gbps Fibre Channel.

Recent trade press indicates that mobile data traffic is estimated to increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. People will continue to expect more from their networks at home, on the road, and at the office. As a result, our industry needs to increase the control, security, and intelligence of the network to support the any-to-any service vision: the enterprise, access, core, and data centre networks must enable any user, with any device, for any content, anywhere.

Video support in all forms will be the most important trend over the next few years. This will also mean that the need for security over networks and deep packet inspection will grow.

What are LSI Technologies’ new offerings in this space?

Recently, we launched a new generation of high-performance MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller cards based on 6 Gb/s (gigabits-per-second) SAS technology. The shift in network infrastructure to carrier-grade Ethernet has caused service providers to demand a new, more sophisticated set of network management tools. The latest Ethernet FPI from LSI provides the OAM acceleration and advanced traffic management capabilities needed by OEMs to deliver next-generation wireless backhaul products.

Carrier-class Ethernet enables rapid, low-cost deployment of the new technologies needed to meet growing demand for network services such as Enterprise Metro Ethernet and wireless broadband. LSI Ethernet FPI 3.0 advances the state-of-the-art with a new suite of scalable features and functions developed expressly for carrier-class Ethernet networks, including wireless backhaul management tools for service classification, reliability and quality. LSI’s media processing software and StarPro Media Processors offers a high-performance solution for a broad spectrum of digital video applications.

What are you doing on the data de-duplication front?

LSI’s technologies help OEM customers as well as enterprise customers reduce risk and improve operational efficiency in the data centre with a scalable virtual tape library and data de-duplication solution. Built on our ‘content aware’ architecture, it enables enterprises to consolidate and protect information by de-duplicating, backing up and restoring petabytes of data at wire speed without disruption to their existing infrastructure.