India leads in cloud storage and converged system adoption

BANGALORE, INDIA: Hitachi Data Systems Corp. (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, announced survey results indicating that India is leading in cloud storage and converged system adoption in Asia Pacific.

The survey results also revealed that more than 50 percent of the large Asia Pacific enterprises that participated in the survey are not anticipating or planning for the advent of “big data.” The survey results clearly indicate that enterprises need to embrace advanced cloud technologies and solutions to manage data growth, transform data into actionable information and harness its power as a strategic asset for business insight and innovation.

The survey results are published in an HDS-sponsored IDC white paper titled “The Changing Face of Storage: A Rethink of Strategy that Goes Beyond the Data”. The survey was conducted by IDC from August to September 2011 with 150 IT executives from large enterprises in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore. HDS commissioned the survey to better understand their storage management challenges, needs and strategies.

“The regional survey results reveal varying levels of maturity and understanding of storage management. The challenge of ensuring data relevancy and managing data growth, which ranked among the top five common issues faced, clearly indicates that the anticipated trend toward big data is something few are ready to take on,” said Simon Piff, associate VP, Asia/Pacific Enterprise Infrastructure Research, IDC.

“HDS believes that data and information must be stored, governed and managed for insight and innovation in order to drive strategic and competitive value,” said Kevin Eggleston, senior VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific.

“Embracing the latest technologies, like cloud services, not only enables enterprises to manage data growth but also to collect and connect data to create valuable information. Our three-tiered strategy of infrastructure cloud, content cloud and information cloud uses a dynamic infrastructure and enables fluid content to gain faster and more sophisticated insight and greater value from stored data.”

Leading in cloud storage and converged system adoption
The Indian market is the most mature in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies and the highest usage levels of converged systems. Fifty percent of respondents in India are using or planning to use cloud storage in the next six to 12 months. Thirty percent of respondents in India are using converged systems and 35 percent are either evaluating or planning to use such systems.

The Indian market responses indicate that the move to more advanced datacenter architectures is well underway, and the growing pains are keenly felt. Data management issues due to explosive growth and new challenges uncovered through the virtualization of the server platform dominate concerns. However, fundamental issues such as managing email growth and backup also remained high.

* Having access to accurate data on a timely basis key to gaining deeper business insight. About 70 percent of respondents in India stated that the demand of the business for deeper analysis outpaces the ability for their systems to ensure the data they had is relevant, timely and useful. Their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it.

* Virtual server sprawl a key concern. Seventy percent cited problems from virtual server sprawl, as they are unable to keep a close track of the virtual platform assets and their alignment to storage.

* Justifying storage investments a key challenge as budgets remain tight. Sixty percent cited aligning IT costs to business budgets and growth as a main challenge to adopting their IT strategy amid current market conditions.

* Insufficient backup window a key issue. Due to the nature of their business, 60 percent of Indian organizations do not have enough time to back up systems.

* Managing email is getting more difficult and expensive. Sixty percent of respondents in India cited concerns over the rising costs in managing email growth.

Top three current concerns in Asia Pacific
In all Asia Pacific markets surveyed, IT executives are primarily concerned with data growth, with 56 percent of respondents citing it as the main challenge; however, 39 percent cited increasing utilization levels and 36 percent cited managing storage for virtualized servers as key challenges. Unstructured data is exploding but many organizations acknowledge that utilization levels have been notoriously low.

Of the respondents in Asia Pacific, 67 percent believe their current storage infrastructure is sufficient for the next 12 months; however, 72 percent do not have a strategy to cope with the anticipated growth of unstructured data – the large multimedia, internet-based or other types of multi-gigabyte “big data” that is now increasingly important as a competitive resource for data mining and other business uses.

Indeed, 64 percent of the respondents in Asia Pacific stated that business needs for deeper analysis outpace the ability of their systems to ensure the data they have is relevant, timely and useful. Their data growth is outpacing their ability to effectively manage it.

“Data needs to be shared, compared, analyzed and visualized more holistically. Only then can data become information used for insight, trending, and leveraged proactively in anticipation of things to come,” said Eggleston. “There is a great potential for the information cloud because it will analyze content independently of applications or media and enable analytics of ‘big data’ to better align itself to human behavior for deeper, more relevant insight, driving innovation, advancing research, enabling better collaboration, and building more sustainable societies.”