Priced at Rs 1.2 crore at the entry level, Tata IBM has launched ESS with an eye on telecom organisations, large banks, stock exchanges and other entities which have large storage needs.

"Besides these, it will be an ideal buy for disaster recovery and data warehousing as it has features to support that. It is fully scaleable and provides universal access to data across all enterprise computing environments," said Tata IBM vice-president systems Nipun Mehrotra.

The announcement is significant as less than two per cent data in Indian organisations is believed to have a back-up, according to surveys. Tata IBM is aiming at the remaining 98 per cent of insecure data with ESS. It builds upon IBM's Storage Area Network initiative announced earlier this year. SANs are separate networks of storage devices dedicated to managing and storing data without tying up the computing resources of the server.

Storage server sales could witness a multi-fold increase with e-commerce taking off exponentially in India. Data storage needs are growing at a rate of more than 80 per cent per annum and will make a quantum jump with the onset of e-commerce.