With India being one of the fastest developing countries, it is becoming a favourite haunt for many IT giants to expand their business. To go by the volume, the US or the western countries have a bigger IT market, but India and China are growing fast and need more storage space than the western countries. India especially needs secure means of storing the data on the network, says Praveen Asthana, vice-president, enterprise storage, networking and strategy, Dell Inc. In an interaction with Moumita Chakrabarti, Asthana reveals Dell?s strategy to help the enterprises in increasing the space both on the servers and the network. Excerpts:
Dell has always been known for its desktops and laptops? Why do you want to venture into the storage market now?
It is true that we major in desktops and computers. But with a surge in information and people sending more emails, it has become very important to manage the storage system in the networks. The enterprises are increasing looking at ways of providing maximum storage facility to their employees. Only increasing the storage capacity is not enough, you need to have better system in place.
Once I asked one of my clients, how good a storage system do you have? He said he was satisfied with the system. I then asked him, ?What if one of your colleagues does have a baby this year, are you prepared for it too?? You might be wondering as to what a baby has got to do with the storage capacity? But once the baby is born, your network would get clogged with pictures of the baby. I am myself a photographer. I do have a tendency to upload my photographs in the right size and resolution. Thus, it is very important to have a good storage system that would keep a back up of all your previous data as well as the regular once.
How has the recession impacted the storage industry in 2009-10?
The year 2009 has been a bad year. With recession hitting hard, many people lost their jobs and many companies had to be shut down. In contrast, the number of emails that people sent increased. Thus, the need to store the information over the network increased. Dell spent $1.4 billion to buy EqualLogic, a company that is involved in developing storage area, a couple of years ago. This has helped to increase the business further. Today, we are the fourth largest in the storage business and we have grown twice more than the other organisations.
How big is the storage market of Dell?
According to the IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Quarterly Tracker, Dell?s revenue in the third quarter stands at $407 and has 9.3% market share. It stands after EMC, IBM and HP. However, globally, Dell has been the fastest growing company in the last five years. It has grown by 25-30% in a year. We should not forget that recession did not affect the storage business at all.
How is Dell different from its competitors in its storage mechanism?
With EqualLogic, we have come up with better technology. Generally, we can add a slot to the existing system and increase the storage space. This is a point-to-point solution. But we provide a holistic solution to the enterprise, who can manage their own storage capacity. They can store it on the network; on the cloud or synergistically.
We have also taken measures to avoid duplication of material while saving it on the network or the server. The storage mechanism that we have in place takes care of de-duplication and one does not need to buy de-duplication processes separately. The simple theory that one needs to follow is that ?Don?t mess it up, or if you do clean it up.? The se-duplication system works at two levels?one at the source and the other is the target. The first is manual, where you do not save things that are already there. It is advisable to clean your mailbox every 15 days and store only those that are important. The second is done by the system where the information is scanned and if it is a duplicate, it is automatically deleted. Not only it helps you save space but also you save a lot of money. Through networking you can get 10 times more gigabytes and bigger bandwidth. We use Ethernet, which is better than fibre channel.
How secure is the storing system?
Our systems have the necessary security measures. While username and passwords are required to access the database, we also have all our data encrypted. So even if somebody hacks into the network, there are minimal risks of information leakage.
Which countries do you think have a surplus of information?
To go by the volume, America or the western countries have a bigger market. But India and China are growing fast and need more storage space than the western countries. To go by the green field method, China and India are the growing markets while the US has already been explored.
In India, we would find that mobile usage per person has surpassed many developed countries. Here latest technologies are better adapted. The US adopted the fibre channel quite sometime back and it is hard to change. But for India, it is different. They are the first time users. So they would prefer to buy tomorrow?s technology.