A: I have been running HP’s high-end storage business for over six years. Every year, one thing that doesn’t change in my presentation slides is the chart showing growth of storage in enterprises. This is due to the fact that most of the information is now digitised. But as opposed to earlier when this growth came from structured/transactional data, it now comes from unstructured data. Sites such as Youtube and Snapfsh host data-heavy fles of millions of users, just imagine the amount of storage they would be consuming! Also, in the high-end portion of storage business, we don’t see any mismatch between performance requirements and availability. Generation after generation, we continue to deliver step function and capabilities.

A: According to my observations, the technology refresh in India is not conservative. On the contrary, India is catching up with the global frontrunners in technology adoption. The sales of newer generation storage arrays have signifcantly increased here.  

But, most certainly, enterprises are conscious of their investment protection while adopting new technologies. Today, a lot of investment goes into the purchase of spinning disks whereas our approach with StorageWorks is to put the entire storage behind a ‘controller’. With HP XP24000 you can take any number of third party products and connect them. We call it external storage but basically what it does to the host/server application is to connect the third party storage behind the controller and present it to the application as if it is internal to the array. It provides a lot of improvement in performance vis a vis the legacy environment. It provides the capability from a Tier1 features function standpoint that they won’t get in the legacy systems. The technology helps offset the initial investment from an acquisition standpoint.

A: Storage virtualisation is indeed being talked about in India very seriously. NIC (National Informatics Centre) has adopted it comprehensively across its organisation. The users in NIC are quite satisfed with the performance and are promoting the capabilities they have got using XP24000.

A: As technologies become more advanced, the most challenging aspect is managing the complexity. CIOs have to manage servers, networks, infrastructures, and also storage. HP, with storage and server convergence, is trying to simplify the management as much as possible. Today you can put blade servers, blade storage, blade switches - all in one cabin and call it convergence. But the magic of convergence comes from its management. And virtualisation is ‘key’ to this whole convergence. When you are doing convergence, you are pulling in more business processes into the same set of attributes.

If you don’t have something highly resilient and highly available, the whole thing may fall apart.

The system should be capable of load balancing dynamically and have the capability of managing an application's performance. Another important aspect of convergence is orchestration. A single team can provision storage, servers and ports in a seamless way using convergence.

A: Absolutely! HP is going to push it very vigorously in the market. We see it providing the enterprises a very unique and necessary technical response to today’s business challenges. An important thing to note here is that all of this is not built around HP infrastructure. This concept very well embraces third party hardware too. It is part of HP’s vision to drive this very aggressively.

A: The thumb rule is to ascertain the business requirements frst. There is no ‘one-size-fts-all’ formula in storage. From an architectural standpoint, CIOs must think that the business requirements today are going to be different from those of tomorrow. Don’t spend money where you don’t need to be spending. Keep the most critical data on tier1 storage. Archive data on secondary storage media.

A: Absolutely! The whole concept of cloud services stems from here. Cloud is basically a very nice visual behind virtualisation and behind tiering. What you are basically offering is capability (from an IT standpoint) to the customers who need to use that infrastructure. It hides the complexity and manages it in such a way that it becomes easy for the businesses to understand.

A: From the convergence standpoint, the specifc platform from HP is part of the converged infrastructure. XP24000 is one piece that can be plugged in and out of this whole platform. From a virtualisation standpoint, HP can virtualise up to 234 petabytes of storage. From a resiliency standpoint, HP provides a nonstop architecture with a nonstop product. It is very much the part of HP’s convergence drive. From an opportunity standpoint, 2009 was a not such a good market. We see a lot of delayed purchase decisions. 2010 is going to be a rebound year. Enterprises are now positioning themselves suitably for growth.