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“Companies look for technologies that can help them compress their data, give them best efficiency of that data along with the high capacity”

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Mastufa
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Amit Malhotra, Director, Senior Director Storage Sales- Japan & Asia Pacific, talks about the company's policy on storage

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What are some of the dominant trends that you see in the enterprise storage market today?

Amit: The storage hardware stack has fallen very rapidly over the last few years, and the customers have aggregated a lot of capacity which is causing them to grow very rapidly in their organization. The typical challenges that the customers are facing are around the management of the capacities that they have invested in. Because the price might be lower but to manage it you need people, software, analytics and physical space and power.

Also, they had lot of solutions in data centers and they were not able to drive the right performance out of the them. So performance piece as well as the management are becoming a key area of concern for CIOs and the people who manage the data centers.

What are the drivers for organizations to look for better ways of tackling variety of data?

Amit: The nature of data on the customer's side is typically divided into two parts -structured data and unstructured data. As compared to structured data, unstructured data is almost three times faster. So companies are looking at technologies that can help them compress that data, give the best efficiency of that data and also with the high capacity that they have deployed.

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Why is Oracle ramping up its storage portfolio?

Amit: Ever since the acquisition of Sun, we have been working hard to get portfolio in place. Sun had Storage tech as a brand before that. For over year and half, we have been ramping up the entire storage portfolio. It is humongous amount of opportunity outside. If you look at Asian Pacific and Japan, the total storage opportunity is close to 7 billion dollars, according to IDC. So there is big opportunity outside. At the same time, the feedback that we got from our customers who have been using our database or application, is that, that we have not been able to get the full power of the portfolio, utilization of database and application. We are seeing to the value that we can bring to the customer by providing vertically aligned solutions and that's riding the some of the relationships that we have with the customers.



What extra benefits do customers get by embracing Oracle storage solutions?


Amit: Whenever a customer buys a particular type of applications, the vendor would tell them look, you need to upgrade your hardware to be able to get the best performance of the application right. At the same time whenever they will buy new hardware, the vendors would say you can only get the best performance of the hardware when you get the next generation application. There has always been a gap between application database and the hardware. What we have come up with this is application with clear storage. Application is made storage aware and at the same time storage is made application aware.

What business verticals do you think are experiencing high growth in terms of storage requirements?

Amit: You know there are two parts about how we see growth for storage requirement. One is generation of new data and second is retention of data due to regulatory compliance issues. Generation of data we see from telecom, some of the utility companies, media and entertainment for generating large amount of data. At the same time you see the financial institution or healthcare or even the government organisations will also retain data for longer period of time.

What are the best practices for enterprises to get maximum benefit from the storage budget while streamlining their infrastructure?

Amit: When we talk to CIO's or go to a customer and ask them how much storage have you deployed, they say that they have deployed 50 TB and are growing at a rate of 30-40 % per year. Very soon I will have 100 TB or 500 TB. When you probe them further and ask them why are you growing so fast the only answer they get is my users are asking for more capacity. So the challenge as I said earlier is that when there is such a big growth in capacity the management becomes a problem. The value that we bring to the table, and I am not saying that we will reduce your growth rate but what we are able to do is manage the solution in a way that we are able to provide, let's say for e.g. very high level compression. So if a customer has been using 100 Tb capacity and growing at 30% YoY, we are able to compress to the tune of 10 times, so we will reduce the 100 TB capacity to 10 TB. The growth rate will still be 30% but instead of growing from 100 TB to 130 TB, they will grow from 10TB to 13 TB. So you can imagine the kind of saving the customer will have and the better manageability that they can have. So the value that we bring to the table is that we don't focus on saying that buy more capacity from us because I sell storage and you want to buy storage, the value we bring is that we work with and understand the customer to help them reduce the capacity that they need and bring it to more manageable level, so that they can get a much higher performance and quality as well.

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