As the recent global economic gloom is slowly becoming a thing of the past, coupled with the ever-increasing growth in information, the HP's offerings in the storage segment are being perceived as a value addition among large organizations as well as small and medium enterprises. 

HP offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for virtual environments from entry- to enterprise-class solutions. In the midrange storage segment, HP LeftHand SAN Solutions based on iSCSI offers virtualized scale-out storage. It enables customers to double capacity utilization with space-efficient snapshots and thin provisioning features included at no extra cost. It supports virtual servers, including support for high-availability and disaster-recovery features in virtual environments. Customers can save up to 49 per cent cost in small sites and remote offices by turning internal server drives into shared storage. 

HP's StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) centralizes management and pooling of heterogeneous storage resources. “HP has also been offering the XP series for external virtualization capabilities for a long time now," said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, StorageWorks Division of HP India. Commenting on the market, he says that storage market continues to grow in India and their channel partners play a key role for the company's expansion strategy. “We work with our channel partners to deliver a complete solution stack rather than a product approach alone. To enable this, we brought the first-of-its-kind triangulation model that brought together channel partners, ISVs and vendors. Today, we operate with more than 150 ISVs in the country. HP is also the first to work with a broad set of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) partners to maximize the potential of the Virtual Resource Pool. We are investing and working with key partners to become storage virtualization specialists,” he said.

A recent Springboard Research report rated HP as the overall industry leader for channel satisfaction. The company says that it will continue to focus on driving mutual success for channel partners and by providing best-in-class partner selling models and customer service support tools. “Partner education is a key aspect. According to AMI partners, around 40 per cent of large enterprise-channel partners are already venturing into server and storage virtualization solutions and are open to more emerging products to capture additional business,” he said. “After-sales service is a critical component for our customers. We go to market in many ways. Customers can opt to receive HP's after-sales services directly or through our channel partners,” added Krishnamoorthy.

Elaborating on the opportunities for channel partners, he says, “India is rapidly moving through the technology maturity cycle and this means a growing number of opportunities in new areas. The adoption of storage virtualization, file level virtualization, document management, document protection, business continuity planning are some of the areas customers are discussing with us. These are the key capabilities that partners will need to build technology competence and capabilities to drive growth. We are also seeing datacenter transformation as a key area that the mid-market and SMBs are adopting.” According to him, “HP is driving numerous programmes across these areas with our partners. We are enabling partners to become datacenter solution experts. We are also working with a focussed set of partners in building strong storage virtualization capabilities and will expand this as we go forward.” 

The Storage Works Division of HP has launched its next-generation storage products and solutions, including the P4000 G2 SAN, P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA) System and LTO-5 Ultrium Tape drives and cartridges in India. The new solutions provide faster application performance, increased scalability while reducing customer's risk of downtime and data loss. These new products and solutions are targeted at small, medium and large business with the aim to fulfil the storage needs in virtualized and physical environments. 

The new HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 MSA System enables small to midsize customers to effectively support rapid business growth with a flexible, easy-to-use and affordable storage area network (SAN) solution. The HP P2000 G3 helps customers scale their storage environments through increased drive capacity and improves application availability and performance with the latest 8-gigabit (Gb) Fibre Channel (FC) controller technology. 

The new HP StorageWorks P4000 G2 SAN Solutions delivers high data availability, in both virtualized and physical environments, through its unique Network RAID functionality. Together with a new energy-efficient architecture, the P4000 G2 SAN reduces customer's risk of downtime and data loss with a better total cost of ownership. 

HP is also expanding its Linear Tape Open (LTO) technology portfolio with the upgraded HP StorageWorks LTO-5 Ultrium tape drives, which deliver improved data transfer speeds and management capabilities. Available with the HP StorageWorks MSL tape libraries, these new archive solutions enable businesses to better manage information through enhanced data protection, disaster recovery as well as long-term data retention operations. 

VARIndia spoke to Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, StorageWorks Division of HP India, who says the company's Storage Business is scaling up.

What do you think will be the key trends related to storage in 2010 - and why? What technologies are driving the market?

As the market begins a steady revival, the business cycle still continue to be little unpredictable.

a. Storage Consolidation will still be the No 1 trend in the market as Organisation. The last two years have seen progress and  2010 will continue to see this as an important Infrastructure trend. Consolidation across FC and IP and also the ability to have local replication and remote replication capability on the same box is making this really compulsive. Be it the large enterprise wanting to consolidate around the FC protocol or a medium sized organization wanting to consolidate leveraging both the FC and IP ( iSCSI )protocol or the smb enterprise wanting to simply leverage IP to consolidate , today the technology is available and affordable an this will drive faster adoption in the days ahead. Every organization will keep Storage Consolidation as the foundation of their agile infrastructure. 

From pure consolidation of business applications, the focus will shift to cover consolidation of file services as well in the coming years. Scale out architecture that presents a single unified view is the future of the enterprise.

b. Storage Virtualisation will be the next worthy trend that the market will see. In order to maximize efficiency and improve utilization and thereby achieve cost saving Storage Virtualisation will enable organizations to move away from Over sized, Under utilized storage infrastructure with difficult steps involved in provisioning and management to a right sized, scale out framework where storage capacity can be easily managed and provisioned. Technology to enable this inside the storage array, behind storage array, across storage array are available today and so one will see Storage Virtualisation complement the Server Virtualisations strategies that organizations worked on for the last two years.

c. Cloud Storage - As organizations improve cost competitiveness and try and link cost of IT with Business Value the days of a shared infrastructure that can be provisioned, utilized, metered and paid as a service is becoming a reality. Supporting technology that help achieve this are available today. Virtualisation is one of the key drives to make Cloud a reality. 

Organisations will strive to CLOUD enable their internal infrastructure as well as look at ways to leverage shared public cloud to achieve higher cost efficiencies. But this is going to take some time in the country but the promise is real and achievable.

d. DATA Protection and Business Continuity - As DATA grows and compliance and regulations tighten it is very important that we have the right infrastructure to provide data protection and the the right processes to provide business continuity. Investments in replication technology, investments in clustering and cluster aware storage, investments in backup and encryption will provide the technology that customers can evaluate and deploy. The new launch of the LTO GEN5 will help reuce the time to backup and the cost of backup. Disk based backed and a combination of disk plus tape based backup would also be influencing data protection design in the coming days.

e.Green Storage, Data Deplication, Tiering of Storage, Use of SSD for high performance applications, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure would be other trends in the industry to watch out for.

The emerging times will be exciting with so much to offer and so much to achieve.

According to HP since server-storage consolidation is gaining momnetum,  is  this a move towards internal storage, away from external Storage? 

Consoldiation is a Journey. What began as physical consolidation continued to evolve and started as Server consolidation and Storage Consolidation. It brought with it new efficiency and cost savings.

We believe that there is an opportunity to synergize these two technology trends thru Convergence and our view of the future of Server-Storage Consolidated is Converged Infrastructure.  It is not about internal storage and external storage but about achieving higher efficiency of capacity utilization and this clearly points in the direction of external storage. Network external storage that can be provided across all servers, expanded based on business needs makes it efficient. 

Further SAN Based booting of computing platforms, Blade based computing etc clearly enable external storage growth and this trend is irreversible.  Internal storage will also continue to grow and there will be a balance. The inflexion point will differ from organization to organization.

Any thoughts on NAS, and/or iSCSI? Where do you see these technologies headed in the coming year?

The year 2010 will also be the year of NAS and iSCSI. 

a. Rapid file storage growth, driven by rich media, document and backup files and email, impacts businesses more now than ever before. 

Consolidating file data with a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution can help you address your changing file serving needs and reduce your cost of ownership by enabling simplified management, better resource utilization, and centralized growth and data protection.

Collaboration among knowledge works in cad/cam, animation will also see growth in NAS adoption

Security Systems, Video Surveillance Systems hold great growth opportunity in the market for NAS

Forms Processing, Document Management Solutions, Records Maintainence, E-Governance - all these will immensely benefit from NAS technology

b. IP is the most pervasive technology in the industry today. Every Desktop and every Server communicate over IP and IP has matured and is easy to manage. If the same IP Technology can be enabled for Storage then it is one technology to handle and the infrastructure cost benefits of IP over FC will help organizations achieve more for their investments with IP. This is the reality and Iscsi  is clearly poised for a strong growth.  

What trends are you seeing in the enterprise as they become more serious about addressing data growth before it becomes a backup problem?

Data Growth is something that enterprises will need to tackle effectively. With data growth the responsibility to protect this data also increases. Government regulations and compliance also brings greater responsibility on enterprise to protect their data.

However there is an increasing trend to use DISK also as a backup media as DISK based restoration results in time savings.

A combination of disk and tape is the future. Tape - it has to be remembered results in saving energy and is “GREEN”.

How is HP reacting to the increasing buzz on storage as a service, cloud storage etc?

HP StorageWorks recognizes the growing relevance of Cloud Storage and the immense opportunity provided by Storage as a Service as it helps organization get started quickly and also spread their costs.

HP works with service providers to constantly innovate and help build the right frameworks to meet the demands of the market.

HP StorageWorks works closely with our HP Technology Consulting team to offer design and deployment services for Cloud deployment. HP Financial Services offer new ways to plan your financial investments to offer Storage as a Services.