Helmut Beck, Vice President, Storage, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, talked to Mehak Chawla about the evolution of enterprise storage and how Indian CIOs were buying storage cautiously
The main driver for storage is also the biggest issue that customers have with storage and that is the enormous growth in storage requirements. Overall, storage saw close to 60% growth in 2011. There has been a huge growth in storage requirements for unstructured data.
In addition to that, the IT budget is an issue and then there is the growing number of regulations that the customer has to comply with, all of which have begun to impact storage decisions. Last but not the least, every storage purchase needs to fit into the existing IT environment and also into the future requirements that the CIO foresees.
There is a high degree of server virtualization and that has a big impact on storage. These are the constraints or factors under which a customer has to make his storage purchase decisions. At the end of the day, the main questions are around managing and protecting organizational data, coupled with these constraints.
Is software starting to play a bigger role in the enterprise storage space?
Software is definitely going to play a more comprehensive role in storage. Technologies such as virtualization and automation are going to see a higher rate of adoption. A simple example is that with virtualization, you buy one physical server and you get ten virtual servers. The same is true for storage as well.
Virtualization software is going to be something that will be present in all serious storage offerings. The storage industry worldwide is crowded with things like automated tiering and thin provisioning. These are the typical results of any virtualization technique. The next thing is automation and that, of course, frees up resources, avoids mistakes and has a clear cost benefit.
There is a third aspect, which is that of consolidation. It is the only way to manage the challenges that come with growth. Consolidation immediately results in scalability with respect to storage.
The stress of software in storage is not just on response time and availability but it also encompasses aspects like security including the ability to encrypt data as required.
Talking of scalability, how important a consideration is that for storage?
Scalability is not a one dimensional phenomenon. You need scalability in terms of both capacity and performance. It is important to understand that scalability doesn’t always start at the top. You need to be able to start small and then grow in terms of capacity and scalability. It is also important to understand that not all data has the same value and that the value of data changes over time. Therefore, you need to be able, even in a storage consolidation solution, to offer different service levels for your data.
From a vendor perspective, if you are unable to offer these different service levels, your customer will always ask you for the highest service level at the lowest price. Through these service levels, a vendor can also bring in price differentiation in the storage offerings and that is the means for a data center, for instance, to optimize its storage cost.
What are the storage buying patterns in emerging markets, and how do they differ from those in the more mature economies?
There is a marked difference in the buying patterns of customers in emerging markets as compared to those of the mature markets. That’s because the dynamics of emerging markets revolve mostly around managing growth and other aspects that have already been taken care of in the mature markets. So the parameters are different. Enterprises here, such as banks and telcos and public enterprises, can benefit from the learning of the more mature markets.
Many organizations here are happy to survive into the next year. There are not many people who are planning for three years like they are in the mature markets. That is because organizations in emerging markets need to respond differently. For instance, about 48% of the population in India is unbanked. As a result, banks in India are compelled to respond to situations differently from those in Europe or North America.
The point here is that, if one is only looking at surviving to the next year, not too much attention goes towards managing future requirements.
Are there any differentiators that you are seeing in India with respect to storage?
We have seen a distinct pattern in India. CIOs here are no longer concerned with simply buying the next box. They are carefully examining issues like security and compliance. Data protection is fast becoming a high interest area for the Indian market.
In the Indian context, one aspect that we find interesting is that Indian IT managers are well versed with technology and aligned with their business needs. Therefore, it becomes important for vendors to constantly offer value propositions that are unique. Discussions around security and extracting the highest availability that’s possible from storage are gathering steam in India.
Though the use of server virtualization is quite commonplace in India, the adoption levels of storage virtualization are dismal. Why is that?
Storage virtualization is now present in each and every storage box whether it is aimed at the mid-market or large enterprise segment. The questions are now around the degree of virtualization. If you do not have any virtualization, you would have physical discs attached to storage. Advanced storage goes beyond that providing functions such as thin or intelligent provisioning. That is, in principle, the same thing that airlines do when they overbook their flights. They know that there is a no-show rate and they want to optimize the utilization of every seat. The same is true for storage. If you are in a typical IT environment, the utilization in terms of how much data you have and how much capacity you buy is about 30%; no more than that. Keeping that in mind, you can do over-provisioning and that is what intelligent provisioning solutions are doing today. The overall hardware utilization can go up to 80% in this manner. When it goes beyond that, your system starts to issue alerts.
One of the reasons behind the high levels of server virtualization is that the server market is highly commoditized. However, going forward, virtualization in storage will be the norm.
Are technologies like Cloud computing influencing storage purchase decisions in India?
If you look closely, you find that Cloud computing is widely discussed in India but hasn’t seen widespread adoption. It’s more from the private Cloud point of view. If you look at virtualization, it is also in degrees. Thin provisioning is a form of virtualization and when you have different storage boxes being managed by a single interface, that is also virtualization. One pain point for which customers in India are evaluating virtualization quite seriously is legacy data, which accounts for 60-70% of the data in a typical organization. The Cloud is the next step after virtualization and, like virtualization, it will also have an impact on storage.
What is your strategy for the Indian storage market?
India is a key market for Fujitsu and one of the regions that we are looking at for growth. We are unified in our approach and are offering our entire portfolio to our customers through a single sales engine.
We have two kind of channel partners. Those who are volume focused for notebooks etc. and those who are value focused like system integrators.
Our focus in India is three dimensional—provisioning additional resources in terms of manpower, brand building and substantially expanding our channel business.