“Many customers want to know if they can leapfrog virtualization and converged infrastructure to move onto the Cloud”

Mike Prieto, Vice President & General Manager, HP Storage, HP APJ, and Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Storage, HP India, talked to Heena Jhingan about storage buying patterns in India and the overall APJ region

Have the storage buying trends in the APJ region evolved with the emergence of the Cloud?
Mike Prieto: Storage buying trends are mostly centered around three areas namely virtualization, Cloud computing and Big Data. In fact, this trend is not restricted to the APJ, rather it is happening in other regions as well. We have invested in various technologies and strategic alliances in order to address the challenges that are blocking the growth of the storage market.

In the APJ, countries like Australia and New Zealand are putting their money in Cloud storage. Singapore and Hong Kong are the regional hubs. Japan is an important growth area. However, such acceleration has not been witnessed in India.

Prakash Krishnamoorthy: There are a significant amount of discussions and evaluations happening around storage on the Cloud in India. Frankly, we are still at the whitepaper stage. There are discussions and pilots but, when it comes to roll outs and purchase orders, we haven’t see much action. We continue to see investments from customers around our CloudSystem Matrix software, which is the orchestration piece, and this is clearly an indication that people are getting the racks together and building the basic infrastructure before they go live on the Cloud.

What’s been the impact of the Cloud on other infrastructure buying patterns?
Krishnamoorthy: Many a times customers come to us asking for virtualization. Server virtualization is something that is very visible in India. Over the last two to three quarters, specifically, a lot of customers have been ready to take the next step in the journey by virtualizing their mission critical servers, which is always a great opportunity to virtualize the storage as well.

The bulk of the SAN infrastructure is attached to Tier 1 mission critical applications. Once customers start virtualizing these applications, you will see storage virtualization become even more significant and that is exactly where our P4000 solutions can help.

When a customer starts such a journey, he logically looks at what’s next and this is where the Cloud comes in. You virtualize, deploy the enabling technologies and convert your IT infrastructure into a private Cloud. A lot of customers come with the idea of moving away from the traditional IT environment where they have silos of infrastructure. They want to know if they can leapfrog virtualization and converged infrastructure and move to the Cloud. Those kinds of customers are evaluating if they can pick one example and move to a private Cloud to test the waters while they shape their own strategic direction. The private Cloud is gaining more traction than the public Cloud.

The public Cloud was expected to grow faster, however, we see greater movement towards the private Cloud. Is this just a phase of the maturity curve and do you expect to see a transition?
Krishnamoorthy: In the future, we will see people using Cloud technology and building private Clouds for their in house purposes, keeping what is core to their business on the private Cloud and also looking at the public Cloud in a hybrid set up. Users are looking at situations where, when the private Cloud runs out of capacity, they can do a Cloud burst and pick some capacity or compute from the public Cloud to augment their private Cloud resources and once the peak unpredictable workload situation is gone, they return them. There is a lot of discussion in the Indian CIO community around how this can be done.

Moreover, it is a matter of the prevailing economic climate. Once a lot of service providers come into the market and bring the second wave of investment to uplift capacity, we will see things changing. Besides, it is also a question of security. With security being a concern and economic conditions not allowing you to be adventurous, customers don’t take an investment decision. However, security is a technology issue, which is fading with every passing quarter.

Prieto: The acceleration of the private Cloud is slowing down the growth of the public Cloud to some extent, mostly because of the security aspect. Nevertheless, buyers in the APJ are ensuring that whatever technology they are buying is Cloud ready.

Traditionally, Indian CIOs have been known to buy storage just because they need it. Is there a change in this mindset?
Krishnamoorthy: In the early stages of adoption, the buyer knows that he has a need and that he can buy and optimize gradually. Today, most investments are happening in a manner where the technology is mature and the business is mature enough to leverage IT to provide strategic insight. The customer today knows exactly how much storage is being bought and why and what are the tenets of the architecture that he is buying. Customers want the best and are evaluating solutions on the basis of low power consumption, low latency and high IOPS.

Are Indian companies following in the footsteps of their counterparts in the US in terms of how they are going about adopting the Cloud?
Prieto: Although India is a little behind in the adoption of the Cloud, the mindset is quite similar. We will see much faster adoption within the next year. The buying habits in India are slightly different from those in mature markets; those are around dollar per TB discussions. It will be nice if we can have a breakthrough and see more deals around dollar per TB or TCO in India, rather than having a price point discussion. China is quite similar to India in terms of price sensitivity but, if you look at countries like Australia, it is quite different.

Krishnamoorthy: Many Indian organizations are playing a pioneering role in adopting new technology. They are acting as a cradle of innovation, giving birth to new models and design imperatives. CIOs in India have complete knowledge of how technology works and how it can be converged. In a few years, we will see solutions being made in India.