'Managing data is crucial'

In Conversation

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) "� a 100% subsidiary of Japanese IT major Hitachi "� is banking on R&D to provide hardware, software and services, P P Subramanian, its MD, tells Business Standard. Excerpts:

How important is date warehousing?

With Gartner estimating that data is growing 30 times every year, managing data is the biggest issue for companies.

Today, data warehousing is as important as the core business for any company.

For instance, active account holder data is more critical than that of a dormant customer for a bank. These needs gave birth to the tiering system, and at present there are many level of tiers like the fibre disk tier, Sata disk tier and tape.

What are the major trends in the data storage industry?

The major technologies available in the data storage industry are Direct Attached Storage, Storage Area Network (SAN)and Network Attached Storage (NAS).

In line with advancing technologies, there is a rapid change in storage capacities also, like when there one SAN was equal to around 10 terabytes "� at present one SAN is equal for greater than 100 terabytes.

Earlier, one storage body could only hold up to 300 terabytes. Today it can hold upto 3,000 terabytes. Now, technology also allows to virtualise multiple SAN islands through a single storage controller.

What is the present storage industry market size?

The addressable storage market size in around $125 million and is growing at 16 per cent per annum. There is a continuous evolution, considering five years back only banks, telecom and upper segment IT companies were using the storage systems.

Three years ago, tier-II banks, telecom companies, IT and manufacturing firms also started using storage solutions. Moving over, in today's enterprise market tier-I banking, telecom, government, IT and ITeS and manufacturing are other verticals that are increasingly using storage devices.

HDS today speaks of virtualisation. What exactly is it?

Virtualisation is 25 times more efficient than standard tape libraries and it reduced the amount of physical storage. Big banks, telecom, IT and ITeS firms and the manufacturing sector are the biggest adopters of the technology.

Virtualisation is the process of connecting five to six storage boxes of different technologies, properties and performances to a single controller or virtualisation engine. This engine is called controller-based virtualisation and becomes a mother storage "� connecting 10 systems to one controller.

But in the virtualisation process, the user can switch the data from one place to another by controlling a single device. In short, virtualisation is the process of bringing all storage together. It can also run disaster recovery through a software called Universal Replicator.

What are the new initiatives at HDS?

HDS is setting up a Proof of Concept Lab in Bangalore, which will help in tackling complex issues in IT implementations.

The lab will help enable companies to run their storage and other applications like ERP and Supply Chain Management and then apply it to real-life situations.