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The fast-growing mid-market storage segment has become the hotbed of innovation and contest in India, with multiple vendors in the fray

By Heena Jhingan

A mid market storage customer now has ample options to choose from, as the segment in India is heated up with almost every vendor offering tempting propositions. Vendors ranging from IBM and EMC to Dell and NetApp have been revving up their mid-market portfolios.
As per IDC, overall data will grow almost 50 times by 2020, which reflects that the storage needs will grow by a greater number due to need to create back up. Analysts believe that of the total storage market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13% till 2016, and a big push will come from the mid market.

Subhodeep Bhattacharya, Regional Director-India & SAARC, Netgear, estimates the mid market for storage in India to be around $8-10 mn.

Explaining the overall structure of the storage market, Amod Phadke, CEO, FusionStor Technologies, says, “The storage market is typically divided into three major segments — Enterprise, SME/SMB and SOHO. Enterprise vertical takes about 20% of the total space, the SOHO segment takes about 10% of the  market and the balance 70% market is taken by the mid-market storage space. The mid-market segment has the biggest storage penetration in India and on an average has been doubling every year.”

The mid market storage space has undergone a significant change over the last two years, mostly driven by rising awareness around NAS and therefor the SMBs have been investing in robust LAN. The mid-market storage has come a long way from the time it meant little more than a NAS box or an IP-SAN at best.

The mid-tier push
Over the past three to five years, the mid market has become the fastest growing as the enterprises in this space demand storage solutions with virtualization and other enterprises class capabilities, including performance, resilience and features , coupled with greater levels of simplification and adaptability.

This is what HP has tried to package in StoreServ 7000 family for SMEs, preserving the enterprise class architecture that have been lying under the 3 PAR Storage array to support the large enterprise customers.

Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner, says the mid-market at present, is most exciting with over 30,000 user enterprises redefining the breadth of storage offerings, depending on requirements that could be starkly different from one another. For instance, under the mid-market segment, an insurance company might suffice with an entry level storage offering, however, the same product will not fit the demands of an animation studio.

Within the segment, there seem different sub categories of users. At the lower end there are customers, who could be looking at simplicity, affordability and efficiency in the solution. Slightly above these, would be the customers serving other clients and building data centers and they typically invest in unified solutions to match their accelerated growth. On the top are the enterprises from media, healthcare and manufacturing industries that need to scale due to big data needs.

The biggest trend in the mid-market storage space today is the shift towards networked storage. Earlier, most of the SMEs in India would use DAS (disk attached storage) in such cases, their environments and networked storage was limited to enterprise data centers only. However with technologies like iSCSI & FCoE making way in the industry, networked storage has become an attractive option for SME customers as it offers them better utilization, performance, scalability besides giving them options like remote backup & disaster recovery.
Bhattacharya of Netgear observes that complex features like de-duplication, replication , thin provisioning that were earlier seen only in enterprise products. are today being demanded by SME customers. Most of the SMB and SME is primarily on the NAS and we are seeing products from entry level 2TB to up to 180 TB in this category. We feel that the NAS ideally serves the SMB customers as it is competent and cost competitive , which is still a key criteria.

Yashpal Soni, Group CIO, Everest Industries says that all mid-market players are in the process of ramping up their businesses and they have eyes set on both organic and inorganic growth. As the companies gear up for the data flood, they must have a storage strategy in place.

“We initially ran applications on servers, and later we moved to NAS. Since we were spread across diffrent locations, we needed solutions that could help us consolidate the applications and give a single layer management platform. We chose to deploy a unified storage system. The unified solution is a good alternative for enterprises that run applications like ERP using a hub-and-spokes approach,” he explains.

Since the CIOs of SMEs look for convenience and reliability, storage-in-a-box or a unified storage offering promises just that with the added benefit of being cost-effective.

The unified way
The mid market is thus witnessing a trend in the making – the proliferation of unified storage solutions that give the mid market the flexibility to plug and play and scale. Unified storage can simultaneously address both block and file needs in a single system — in place of what used to be multiple systems. A unified storage system can provide a single point of management for storage volumes, snapshots and replication, whether stored data is block or file, and has therefore quickly risen to become a serious contender in the storage market. In the mid market, in particular, the unified storage is positioned for dominance.

It all started with NetApp setting the trend and got the ball rolling, compelling nearly every vendor to join the unified storage bandwagon, including EMC with the VNX and Isilon solutions. Smartha Guha Thakurta, Mid Tier Lead, EMC India & SAARC, says they made the mid market offering more comprehensive with their Avamar data recovery and backup solutions. Players like Onmobile, Karvy, Dr. Reddy’s, Indiabulls, Comviva, Kotak Group and Dena Bank are some of the buyers of EMC’s unified storage solutions.

HP also brought in unified storage offering with IBRIX on top of its P4000 and 3PAR block platforms and it continues to build on its 3PAR acquisition. Dell integrated its Exanet NAS controllers to its EqualLogic storage systems. The unified storage completely alters how storage is purchased, provisioned and managed.

In fact, along with the recent launch of the 3PAR StoreServ 7000 family, HP also announced HP StoreEasy 3830 Gateway that can connect with a 3PAR StoreServ 7000 array to serve SMB/CIFS/NFS storage from the 3PAR StoreServ block array. This, the company claims, is its own recipe for mid-market unified storage.

Recently, Hitachi Data Systems also introduced its new Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM), claiming to enable 90% faster data migration and 30% better total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to non-virtualized systems. Designed specifically for medium enterprises in India, HUS VM assures simplified operations and enables more efficient storage management across all virtualized storage assets, including multi-vendor storage.

According to Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President and General Manager, India, Hitachi Data Systems, “With solutions like these, now enterprises of all sizes can virtualize, manage and unify their choice of data on a single platform.”

Gujarat-based Atul Limited currently has a mix of fiber channel based and IP based storage systems (IBM storage solutions – DS3400 and DS3512) catering to its present requirement . The company’s President-IT, Rajat Sharma, informs that the company has requirements for both speedy storage systems for critical applications, as well as bulk storage for record keeping/historical data backup purposes and plans to invest in unified storage solutions.

Despite the tall claims that unified storage players make, there are many who are still unconvinced. For instance, Ashish Bhatnagar, Co-founder and CTO, Mydala, feel that the industry needs to come up with more convincing case studied to compel the companies to invest in these storage solutions.

He says Mydala runs on NAS on a spindle system “We took a big NAS cluster and bifurcated it depending on our analytics. While we were evaluating NAS vs SAN we observed clear benefits of NAS that would gives us much faster replication and cost us 30-40% cheaper as compared to SAN solutions.”

However, he has no intentions of investing in unified storage solutions yet. He says, “All dotcoms or companies that need to have faster data, especially mobile data could be potential buyers of unified storage. Unified storage refers to a single storage system that can provide both file sharing in the form of a NAS and block services in the form of a SAN, with greater manageability. They can choose a unified storage system which is low on capex, requires less management, can be deployed faster as compared to a NAS solution, which takes about one and a half months of deploying and fine-tuning everything. Besides, storage strategy is something that you cannot change every now and then.”

“This is one reason why we have done better than our competitors as we do not change the product architecture. Transitioning from physical to virtual environments, the industry will see greater adoption of unified systems,” says Krithiwas Neelakantan, Director – Channel & Alliances for India & SAARC Operations, NetApp.

These are initial years of the big change in the mid market storage space. The existing users, sitting on legacy storage boxes, are seeing value in the new cloud-ready unified storage system, and are likely to pre-schedule their storage hardware refresh. The newbies in the business are investing in unified IP storage solutions as it gives the advantage of getting started much faster. Going forward, the market is set to see many more announcements around the mid market with enhanced capabilities.

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