By Owais Mohammed, Regional Lead & Sales Director, Western Digital – Middle East, Africa, Turkey & Indian Subcontinent
With India becoming a digital powerhouse, data has evolved from a mere byproduct of businesses to being the most valued asset today. According to IDC’s Worldwide Global DataSphere Forecast, 2025–2029, the annual volume of data generated is projected to surge to 527.5 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2029. This staggering growth is fueled by AI, the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, immense popularity of over-the-top (OTT) services as well as short form video content and the relentless demand for real-time analytics.
With explosive data growth, IT infrastructures focus heavily on performance, efficiency, and scalability. Businesses are looking for solutions that handle a variety of workloads while fulfilling sustainability and economic goals. Let’s look at top five trends which will be shaping India’s storage going forward.
#1 AI pushes the industry into the Yottabyte age
AI is no longer a niche technology. It’s a primary driver of data creation and consumption. In the Indian context, diverse sectors such as Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), healthcare, technology and e-commerce have not only been generating business value, but unprecedented volumes of data through AI and machine learning applications. With such data-intensive workloads, the demand for scalable, AI-ready storage architecture is the need of the hour. Solutions that combine NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) architectures with seamless scalability high-capacity HDD solutions play a vital role in supporting the challenging requirements of the AI era, providing fast, reliable, efficient, and cost-effective solutions to meet the data-hungry demands of tomorrow’s innovations while staying economically and ecologically efficient.
#2 The green imperative in data storage
With the growing volume of data, the energy needed for storing and processing is also growing. Data centres continue to expand with a capacity already exceeding 1.5 GW and are expected to add around 260MW by end of this year according to a CBRE report. In combination with the need to support an increasing amount of AI, ML, and IoT workloads, their power consumption for computing, processing, storing, and cooling is surging as well. This sector’s energy consumption is predicted to surge from less than 1% of India’s total electricity use today to nearly 3% by 2030. With this in mind, sustainability will continue to be a key consideration as well.
With sustainability becoming a boardroom priority, organizations are seeking ways to reduce both energy consumption and environmental impact. By upgrading to high-capacity, energy efficient HDDs, companies can optimise the total cost of ownership and lower power consumption per terabyte (kWh/TB). For example, transitioning from 26TB ePMR HDDs to 32TB UltraSMR HDDs to deploy one exabyte of storage can lead to 18.7% fewer racks, 18.8% fewer HDDs, and an 18.8% reduction in total power consumption making denser storage a competitive advantage in sustainability.
#3 The role of HDDs
With the sheer volume of data generated by AI/ML, big data analytics, and the cloud, all that information needs to be stored reliably and cost-effectively at scale. Ongoing HDD innovations are already enabling larger storage capacities than ever before, making them indispensable for large-scale deployments and optimizing TCO at scale.
High-capacity HDDs will continue to be in demand as they deliver an improved TCO when factoring in both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operational expenditures (OpEx), including power consumption, maintenance, repairs, and the initial acquisition cost of drives and platforms. These efficiencies enable organizations to maximize operational profitability, making HDDs the backbone of data storage for hyperscale data centers, cloud providers, and enterprises.
#4 Data Sovereignty and the impact of local storage
Public clouds remain critical for enterprises worldwide, but with most organizations being covered by some form of data privacy legislation and data sovereignty laws, private cloud infrastructures are gaining momentum. Apart from more control over sensitive and critical business data sets as well as compliance with local legislation, there are additional reasons why private clouds may be a better option. For one, the adoption of AI in enterprise environments means that several teams are pulling unstructured data from everywhere they can. To avoid bottlenecks in latency and slow down training and insights, local storage systems offer the benefit of higher speeds. Furthermore, having an on-premises solution enables companies to have better financial visibility and predictability.
Ultimately, private clouds might be more attractive for data-intensive workloads that demand high security and compliance, speed, or are highly integrated with other systems.
Building the Intelligent, Sustainable Storage Ecosystem of Tomorrow
The next era of storage will be driven by denser HDDs and high-performing storage platforms which are built to meet the growing requirements of AI and next-generation workloads. The attention is shifting from just capacity to adaptability, efficiency and smarter systems at scale. Storage ihas evolved from infrastructure to the backbone of the digital evolution.