The Hindu Business Line : ‘Our vision is to build content-aware storage solution’

“With virtualisation, smarter archiving methods and more flexible architectures, enterprises are able to function better,” says Hitachi Data Systems Director

Preethi J.

Bangalore, Sept. 10 Storage economics and what’s coming up next in the storage arena: Mr Adrian De Luca, Director, Storage Solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, shares his company’s vision in an interview with < i>Business Line.

How has storage changed since the past five years?

Storage used to be predominantly adding more capacity to store more data. Then archival and the concepts of information lifecycle management entered. While consolidation is the first of the steps to a more efficient storage environment, it is not enough. Indian companies are successfully consolidating their resources. With virtualisation, smarter archiving methods and more flexible architectures, enterprises are able to function better.

What about innovation in hardware and storage architecture? Has that stopped?

Innovation has moved into software. It has been three years since virtualisation was invented. It helped the storage administrator get the maximum out of the storage hardware. Software is now becoming a critical component of any enterprise backbone. When a company undergoes a technology refresh cycle (about once in three years), the CIO approaches us to learn what innovations could help him control costs, minimise complexity and lower risk. Complexity is the increasing number of users, data and inbox sizes, space constraints etc. The company also does not want to re-architect its entire network while upgrading. That constitutes a risk. These are the factors that constantly challenge us to innovate.

What’s after virtualisation?

Policy-based data management to classify documents and archive them intelligently is now being implemented. De-duplication, which ensures that only one copy of a duplicated file is stored, has also made a difference to many firms. Now application-aware storage management is being seen. HDS has decided to talk the language of application vendors. By interfacing with the application layer instead of the server layer, decisions on storage and transfer of data across a network can be made faster.

Services such as risk analysis and storage economics are also being offered. Our 60 consultants work across the APAC region, auditing the customer’s current storage network, looking at server and application utilisation metrics, researching future needs and finally offering advise and best practices.

Our vision is to build a content-aware storage management solution. It will build on the application-awareness and policy-based archival. It will align to different applications, recognising email for example, to store them intelligently. This is what we will be working to realise.

How is India’s storage adoption compared to its neighbours?

Traditionally, the country has lagged by about 12-18 months. But it is now world-class in adoption. CIOs here are asking the same questions as their counterparts across the globe. However, India is different – the scale is huge here compared to the other Asian countries. There is a massive growth and a need for smarter storage solutions, instead of just more hardware to store more terabytes.