Trend

Storage services on fire

With storage complexity on the rise, services around storage solutions are set to become a hot area for storage vendors, predicts Abhinav Singh.

There was a time when data growth was minimal and so was the complexity of storage solutions. Customers were also not demanding, and there weren’t multiple applications running within an organisation. Today the scenario has changed completely, because the last few years have seen organisations doubling or tripling their storage requirements. The growth has been accompanied by an immense growth of data along with new tiers of storage being added by customers.

This has given storage vendors an opportunity to offer storage services built around their products within a customer’s IT infrastructure. Service and consultancy around storage can start at a basic level of creating a blueprint of network storage, or at the pre-implementation stage (sizing of storage), or during the implementation stage, or during the post-implementation stage when the customer wants to scale up his storage architecture. Then there are new compliance standards that have emerged (Sarbanes Oxley Act, BASEL II, 21 CFR) which are driving organisations towards specialised storage requirements.

Comments Sumant Pal, Director, Consulting and Management Services, EMC, “Data has become mission-critical for businesses. They are therefore increasingly looking to derive more value from it as well as their storage infrastructure investments. Additionally, the digital information explosion and compliance requirements are also driving customers to seek storage consulting and expertise from vendors. Consulting services are important especially in the storage segment as it a niche area that requires an expert’s intervention. Vendors want to do this to become trusted partners with their customers and to generate incremental revenues.”

Storage consulting

According to market sources, the storage consulting market across Asia is expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in 2005, with India being one of the fastest-growing storage markets in the world. Consequently, it also constitutes a significant portion of the consulting market. Independent of size, companies that view information as a strategic asset and have an information-intensive business are availing of consulting services. The telecom and BFSI verticals are especially quick to lap up consulting services.

Today, the focus is on providing solutions rather than products. Vendors are increasingly realising that they need to be complete solutions providers. Be it hardware, software or services, point-products don’t help; it is important to become trusted partners of their customers. The service component is particularly important to generate incremental revenue. Vendors such as Network Appliance, EMC and Brocade have successfully entered into the storage consulting and services arena, and are finding takers for these services in the Indian market. Let us take a closer look at what is driving service and consulting offerings around storage solutions, and what its scope is in India in the near future.

Configuration balance

Storage architectures have become complex. For example, a company may have an ERP / CRM application / Exchange application running in its IT environment, and wants to configure the storage product with the application for the maximum utilisation. It also wants to incorporate the best practices from the application side as well as the storage solution side. Says George Thomas, Country Manager, India and SAARC, Network Appliance, “We have service offerings for different applications, so we first thoroughly study the customer’s environment and then customise our storage solution as per the application environment at the customer’s end.” Network Appliance has a team of trained people in different applications such as Microsoft Exchange or on Oracle, and it is able to install the product as per the customer’s requirements. Adds Prashant Gadikar, Manager, NGS India, Network Appliance, “By providing services around storage solutions, we aim to achieve better customer satisfaction levels. We are seeing demand for services especially from customers who are looking at large-scale Disaster Recovery (DR) [could be multi-city DR] or Business Continuity Planning, and want to scale up their storage infrastructure exponentially.”

Regulatory requirements

Recent times have seen a growing regulatory environment and the need for risk management on behalf of customers; this has led to specialised services around storage. New regulations such as BASEL II and SOX are compelling organisations to protect critical data and acquire the ability to recover it fast in case it is lost. Regulatory compliance has driven the need for classification and storage policy services which are fundamental to information lifecycle management (ILM).

Storage vendors are now actively providing policy-based information management services that are essential to adhere to ILM policies in an organisation. These extended services around storage are helping customers efficiently move data to various tiers of storage as service requirements for specific information change over the information lifecycle. Notes Shyam Gopal, Country Manager, India, Brocade Communications Systems, “It has now become essential for customers to adhere to all the different regulations. They need to have a simpler storage infrastructure, and it has hence become important to avail the services of experts to consolidate data and then segregate it as per regulations.”

We have service offerings for different applications, so we first study the client’s facility and then tailor our storage solution as per the application environment at the customer’s end George Thomas Country Manager India & SAARC Network Appliance	Large enterprises are going to employ tactical professional services to mitigate their storage complexities, whereas small enterprises will take services on a pay-and-use model Shyam Gopal Country Manager India Brocade Communications Systems

Storage consolidation

Storage vendors are also providing services around storage consolidation to help customers align their architectures with their business requirements. Pal says, “We provide extensive expertise in classifying information, aligning applications and migrating data so that our customers consolidate server and storage environments and accomplish data centre re-locations with less complexity, risk and cost.” Vendors are also providing storage management optimisation services which are helping customers analyse the state of their storage management operations and identify what improvements need to be made; it also helps them integrate people and policies as per their business requirements.

Large, small

As far as availing storage services is concerned, large-scale adoption by big enterprises has been seen, but the smaller ones are yet to avail of these. Pratik Mehta, the Business Development Manager of Cisco Systems (India) remarks, “Large enterprises, mainly from the BFSI or telecom sector, will drive services around storage due to the unpredictable growth their business is subjected to. Companies in the telecom sector are witnessing a huge spurt in their subscriber base, and hence they are expanding their storage infrastructure rapidly.” It is expected that small enterprises will avail of such services on an as-needed basis. Gopal puts it very well: “Large enterprises are going to employ tactical professional services to mitigate their storage complexities due to the complexities of their businesses, whereas small enterprises which are growing will take services on a pay-and-use model.”

To tap this growing market, vendors will have to ensure that they have the trained professionals who can provide to-the-point service to help customers achieve optimum utilisation of their storage assets, and also tailor-make their solutions to precisely fit the requirements of their customers.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com