Large-Volume Storage

Storage has been the growth segment of the year, with concerns of disaster recovery and business continuity topping enterprises agenda. This new category includes storage solutions such as SAN and NAS. We’ve included this category in Users’ Choice this year because enough activity is happening in the storage area–48% of the respondents to the survey already own large-volume storage and 29% intend to buy in the next year. The big news in enterprise is the movement beyond server-attached storage and into NAS and SAN. The first step in storage consolidation is being taken by many an enterprise right now.

The winner in this category is HP. The runner-up is IBM with a UPI of 51%, followed at a distance by Dell and Veritas at UPIs of 22% and 15%, respectively. Sun is at number five. Others that got votes in this category are EMC, Iomega, Hitachi, NetApp, Brocade, Legato, Fujitsu, Unisys, Broadcom, HDS, Maxtor, StorageTek and Emulex, show the amount of action in this relatively high-budget category.

In current usage, too, the honours list is more or less the same. The only difference is that Sun comes in at number four, pushing Veritas down to five.

HP struck the chord with companies with an IT spend of over Rs 50 lakh voting for it as their brand of choice. It is government departments and research centers, followed by the banking and finance that gave HP the push. It got maximum votes from the North and West zones. IBM gets the nod from companies with an IT spend of over Rs 25 lakh to Rs 50 lakh, those from the North zone and the government departments and research bodies. Dell, on the other hand, got its votes from companies with an IT spend between Rs 25 lakh to Rs 50 lakh, those from the South zone and BPO and software verticals.

Of our respondents, we saw that only 48% currently have large volume storage solutions in place. And this is the biggest challenge that vendors are going to face in this arena–the challenge of moving users away from direct attached storage on to networked attached storage devices and then on to storage area networks.

Also, many of the world’s top players, particularly in the storage software front, are yet to take a position in India. Once the market reaches a size for them to take an interest here, it would be interesting to see whether the dynamics of the market change.