A:  style="text-align: justify;">In Q3 (July-September) 2009, IDC estimates the revenue for the India disk storage systems market to be US$ 62 million, a decline of 11.4% year-on-year (over Q3 2008) and 3.9% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009). In terms of new capacity, the market saw a growth of 13.9% year-on-year (over Q3 2008) and 13.0% quarter-on-quarter (over Q2 2009).

EMC leads the India disk storage systems market for Q3, 2009 with a 27% market share in terms of factory revenue followed closely by IBM. EMC and IBM have been vying for the top slot for last few quarters on the basis of some strong gains in the government, telecommunications and fnancial services verticals.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">Most of the data created in enterprises today is unstructured and duplicated. Most enterprises keep production environment data on Tier 1 storage and after a certain number of days move it to secondary storage. Thus, judicious allocation of storage, based on importance and requirements, is an issue. Also, retrieving data for further use is another major concern for enterprise IT managers.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">As a trend, storage virtualisation has started receiving due attention in India, specially from verticals such as banking and financial services, manufacturing and telecommunications but actual adoption is still in a nascent stage with approximately 8% of Indian enterprises adopting the same during 2008-09. Vendors are seeing a stronger uptake in large enterprises and select mid-sized companies.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">Increasingly ‘storage-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud storage’ will be driven by Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to service enterprise customer requirements as they look at providing value added services (VAS) and also utilising their infrastructure better.

A:  style="text-align: justify;">Networked storage will see increased adoption in 2010 to meet demands arising from expansion plans of the IT/ IteS and telecom companies as well as to support enterprise IT initiatives like data centre consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR).

A: The economy in India is improving and fnancial results for most enterprises for the second and third quarters of 2009 have shown promising signs. Customers have started spending again on storage infrastructure.

India’s disk storage systems market is increasingly driven by business continuity and disaster recovery solutions and enterprises have invested heavily on building the same even during the recent economic downturn. This trend has also helped drive the overall storage solutions market.

Increasingly, unifed storage platforms will find adoption in enterprises; VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) will drive the adoption of high end storage solutions in future.

vinita.gupta@9dot9.in