As the market has started stabilising after the recent global economic gloom, coupled with the explosive growth in information, the HP's offering in the storage segment is perceived as a value addition among small, medium and large organisations. According to a new study conducted on behalf of HP, nearly 75 per cent of business leaders say that their technology department is a key enabler of their business success. Eight out of 10 CXOs think that the new economy will require significantly more technology-focussed approach on market needs. With the unfolding of new HP StorageWorks enhanced offering in SAN virtualisation and networks as well as converged infrastructure architecture, the company is upbeat about the Indian market.

With a major role of channel fraternity in carving out the business model for the company, HP sees that the mantra for success comes from its customers, who need to rebalance the physical and virtual environments by realigning traditional technology silos in tandem with today’s needs. Through more than 150 ISV partners, the company is working with key associates in the storage virtualisation domain. A recent report by Springboard Research says that HP as a leader for channel satisfaction comes as a shot in its arm.

Speaking on the market trends, Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, StorageWorks Division of HP India, says that the rapid growth in information management and the constant change in the business models are the two key drivers of storage. As the organisations are looking for an infrastructure that allows them to scale up the business needs and technology to be elastic. Today, most conventional architectures allow businesses to scale up, but are not flexible when it comes to scaling down. “To evolve to a next-generation data center with technology that is elastic, a new approach for deploying servers, storage and networking needs to be adopted," he said.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure combines the pools of networking, storage, servers, management software, power and cooling into single environment that allows organisations to quickly build an elastic infrastructure while optimising storage environments to maximise RoI. According to Krishnamoorthy, the Virtual Resource Pools – a key enabler of this technology – allows the virtualisation of shared storage and networking resources to provide an easy to manage, cost-effective and shared-service environment.

The company 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 offer virtualised scale-out storage. It enables customers to double capacity utilisation 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.

“The HP X9000 systems provide customers with data-intensive operations to virtualise stored files and create a single pool that is instantly accessible. The system offers an industry-leading 16-petabyte single namespace, or virtual file system capacity. With our recent acquisition of IBRIX, HP now also offers file-level virtualisation that leverages technology from this acquisition,” he said. In the enterprise range, HP’s Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) offers virtualised scale-up storage. The EVA family uses a unique disk level virtualisation technology to reduce stranded storage, which enables consolidation of resources into fewer disks, which can pay off in major savings in power, cooling, and floor space costs. A study “Enterprise Storage Solutions for Database Applications” by Alinean shows that HP StorageWorks EVA technology requires only 62 per cent of the raw capacity in comparison to competing FAS-technology storage.

HP’s StorageWorks SAN Virtualisation Services Platform (SVSP) centralises management and pooling of heterogeneous storage resources. “HP has also been offering the XP series for external virtualization capabilities for a long time now, "added Krishnamoorthy. 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 (ISV) partners to maximise the potential of the Virtual Resource Pool. We are investing and working with key partners to become storage virtualisation 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 virtualisation 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 virtualisation, file level virtualisation, document management, document protection, business continuity planning are some of the areas we are seeing customers discussing with us. These are key capabilities that partners will need to build technology competence and capabilities to drive growth. We are also seeing data center 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 data center solution experts. We are also working with a focussed set of partners in building strong storage virtualisation capabilities and will expand this as we go forward.

Speaking of the future roadmap, he says that some of the key areas as the industry moves forward will be the convergence of the different technology layers that include converged infrastructure. It will be a base for service providers to deliver numerous pay-per use models, such as Infrastructure as a Service, Storage as a Service, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and private and public cloud. “The other areas that will look very promising through 2010 will be file and storage virtualisation, virtual resource pools, data protection and business continuity planning,” concludes Krishnamoorthy.