The Indian storage market is on track to reach $384 million in 2014, an 11 percent increase from the $346 million of 2013, according to Gartner. This figure is expected to rise to $550 million in 2017.
Says Deepak Jadhav, Director, VDA Infosolutions, Mumbai, 
“Some drivers in the storage space are storage modernization, consolidation, and back-up and archival. However, conversations with customers are driven by new technologies such as flash, software-defined storage (SDS) and storage virtualization.”
Flash According to industry estimates, flash storage will be one of the biggest storage trends for the next couple of years. As per IDC, the Indian SSD array opportunity is projected at $20 million by 2015. With the prices of flash dropping by 14-15 percent YoY, adoption is increasing manifold.
“Almost 40 percent of our storage projects include flash against 10 percent last year. Customers are recognizing that flash offers 10 times the performance of HDD and saves up to 90 percent on power and cooling,” says Jadhav.
In most cases, flash is used for less than 10 percent of the capacity, SAS for 20 percent, and SATA drives accounting for the rest. “A hybrid environment helps us to balance customer demands on both performance and price,” explains Girish Madhavan, Director, Quadsel Systems, Chennai. “However, many customers are also asking for all-flash arrays.” Flash will lead the high IOPS storage market as discussion with customers is moving from a response time in milliseconds to microseconds.
SDS, storage virtualization
SDS and storage virtualization are finding acceptance among mid-market and enterprise customers grappling with numerous storage arrays. According to industry estimates, while storage virtualization is likely to be a $1 billion global opportunity by 2015, SDS will grow faster than SDN over the next three years. By 2017, almost 70 percent of all enterprise storage will be virtualized.
“Data storage demand is growing by more than 50 percent YoY,” says Madhavan. “Customers are asking for automatic self-managed storage, scalability, rapid provisioning and high business continuity.”
Adds Neel Shah, MD, Insight Business Machines, Mumbai, “SDS and storage virtualization abstract the storage capacity into a pool of virtual storage which lets users create virtual disks, then assign and re-create them.”
Insight has deployed three SDS projects worth Rs 1.2 crore for its customers in the media. The company has bagged two more SDS projects and has seven projects in the pipeline. Overall, it expects SDS to contribute Rs 9 crore to its turnover in the current fiscal.
Says Jadhav, “Customers with more than three types of storage, capacity of 200 TB or more, and variations in storage utilization will opt for SDS. It can save 20-30 percent on their Capex and Opex for acquiring and managing new storage solutions.”
Back-up and DR
The global opportunity for back-up, archival and recovery is estimated to be $17 billion while the Indian market is projected to cross $120 million in 2014. Indian organizations are taking back-up and recovery seriously because of new regulatory requirements from various government bodies, and global compliances such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.
Many customers are considering cloud-based archival solutions. The global cloud-based back-up and archival market crossed $2 billion in 2013, and will cross $10 billion by 2018. “We are seeing adoption of back-up on the cloud by enterprises and SMBs who don’t find value in maintaining back-up processes in-house. Of our total 900 customers, we added 250 customers on cloud last fiscal,” says Sandeep Vahi, Director, Compton Computers.
