The Hindu Business Line : Tailored for an SME fit

Today, Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) appear to have a variety of hardware solutions to choose from, unlike in the past. This change in market scenario is largely a result of the SME sector’s growth, which is close to 20 per cent, industry reports say.

‘High hardware utility’

There are over 10 lakh SMEs with scope for IT implementation. Research firm Zinnov says Indian SMEs spent about $4.8 billion on hardware in 2006, a 24 per cent growth over 2005. Storage solutions contributed about $500 million to this.

Amit Aggrawal, Engagement Manager, Zinnov, says hardware utility among SMEs is high, unlike software.

This is illustrated by SMEs opting for hosted server solutions where each company takes up 10-15 ports for storage as opposed to buying the entire server.

This ensures that the companies pay only for the ports they use.

Ports are interfaces on a computer to which one can connect a device. They equip data transfer and storage.

In the past, SMEs bought systems with more ports than their requirement, thus ‘paying more for less.’

Simple, quick configuration

Cisco Systems’ storage area network (SAN) switches come with eight-port interface (typical requirement for an SME). Depending on the requirement, users can scale up to 24 ports, paying for every additional port they use, says the company.

Additionally, features such as port channelling, security, advanced diagnostics and real-time performance monitoring are bundled into these systems.

“SME customers may not have dedicated resources to manage their storage networks. So our switches come with simple and quick configuration tools,” says Sumit Mukhija, Business Development Manager, Cisco India & SAARC.

Blade servers, virtualisation

IBM recently started offering blade servers and virtualisation technologies for SMEs. Blade servers are self-contained servers designed for high density.

They may not have power cords, network cables or other computer peripherals associated with conventional servers and are, hence, compact.

IBM’s blade server range eliminates the need for SMEs to own and operate data centres.

One blade server is equivalent to about five conventional servers and systems built around them can sit on a desktop and plug into a standard 240-volt power outlet. Each such system can manage up to six blades and storage simultaneously, explains Ajay Mittal, Country Manager, System x, IBM India/ South Asia.

JRG Securities Ltd, a brokerage house with over 2 lakh customers, opted for this solution.

The company wanted a new storage system as the existing one, consisting of 15 standalone IBM servers that were partially integrated, could not service customer requests fast enough.

Today, four IBM BladeCenter servers support the company’s online trading application, while two servers each run the SQL database,.NET applications and act as file transfer protocol servers and a file/print server. All servers are connected to a disk device and a tape drive storage system.

Post deployment, not only did the system performance improve, but JRG Securities also had more floor space to use for other purposes, according to the company.

It’s all in tape

Quantum Corp, a vendor of back-up, recovery and archive systems, has a range of tape drives and automation systems, starting from about Rs 22,455 upwards. Tape drives are devices that store data on magnetic tapes. A collection of tape drives is called a tape library.

Sunny John, Country Manager, Quantum Corp, says the falling price of hardware solutions is making SMEs embrace them.

To differentiate itself from competitors, the company offers value-adds in the form of patented data de-duplication technology in disk-based backup systems.

Quantum’s SME focus would be on the telecom, banking, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare and media sectors.

John recollects an instance where some small local banks were having problems in taking backup of their daily operations. They used one system for both front-end and back-end work. As a result they typically started back-up operations after office hours and finished a few hours before office opening time.

However, problems arose as the back-ups started taking longer than 12 hours to get completed.

Quantum implemented a hybrid system comprising a physical tape library and a virtual tape library (VTL). One could quickly move the day’s backup to the VTL and return the system for front-end work. Data was later transferred from the VTL to a physical tape. The whole process took only three-four hours.

Virtualisation refers to having circuits in a computer processor and memory controller to enhance the running of multiple operating systems.

This means making a device behave as multiple devices, doing multiple jobs simultaneously.

It involves partitioning the computer memory and making it work as multiple memory devices. Work split between these multiple memories is completed faster than if it were to be processed by one composite memory.

Drive for reliability

Besides demand for better cost per gigabyte (GB) and higher capacity, SMEs also want higher reliability drives, says Sharad Srivastava, Director Sales (India & South Asia), Western Digital, a hard drive manufacturer.

The company taps post-production and animation houses where storage requirements are measured in terabytes; a terabyte (TB) equals 1,000 GB. Recently, it launched a 750 GB hard drive with a data transfer rate of 3 GB a second and a 16 MB cache. It also launched notebooks with storage capacity of up to 2 TB along with remote access and sharing facilities.

Reliability was the key factor that led A.V.R. Venkatesa, Chief Executive Officer, Tex Tech International, to opt for HP’s ‘All-in-One’ storage system. This e-publishing company had to receive, manage and make available (online) large files to publishers in the UK and the US.

“We needed a hosted storage system that would not deter performance levels,” says Venkatesa. Keeping costs and business scalability prospects in mind, he felt HP’s solution was value for money (at about Rs 2.5 lakh a Terabyte) as it also included data security and auto loader facilities.

Industry sources say the average size of an SME hardware deployment today is about Rs 10 lakh, compared to the few lakhs it used to be some years ago. SMEs usually buy scalable hardware to last them at least three-four years.

Plug-and-play model

Rahul Guha, Director, Channel Development, Hitachi Data Systems, says SMEs today are no different from large enterprises when it comes to tackling issues such as risk mitigation, cost-cutting and improved service levels. “They want affordable storage with functionalities of an enterprise class storage,” he says.

Hitachi develops and delivers service-oriented storage solutions in a plug-and-play model.

These offer services such as content management (search, indexing), data migration, dynamic ‘Thin’ provisioning, storage security services (logging, auditing, data shredding), data classification and de-duplication and file management.

Hardware vendors are capitalising on this situation. HP, with about 20 storage solutions already, launches a new one every two-three months and an update each month. Last month, it launched a blade server version of the ‘All-in-One’ and will come out with two new products in November and February, says Neeraj Matiyani, Business Manager, HP StorageWorks, HP India.

archana@thehindu.co.in