Som P Satsangi, VP, Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking, HP Enterprise Business, said that enterprises were investing in secondary DR sites. By Heena Jhingan
How critical is software in the storage business and how has it affected the composition of the market?
Pure hardware alone cannot give enterprises an optimal setup. In a converged infrastructure environment, where one box contains modular storage, compute and networking gear, to be able to control this box, a software layer is required. All of this needs to be orchestrated in a manner that, as per demand, the system should be able to adjust automatically so that the use of the infrastructure is optimal. The software piece plays a major role in automating and templatizing things. Most enterprises are starting out on their Cloud journey and they need to know if their application is ready for the Cloud. Therefore, we have created Cloud maps or pieces of software that take an enterprise’s existing application, put it on the Cloud map and make it ready for the Cloud. We are the second biggest player in software after Microsoft.
Acquisitions such as that of Autonomy have been crucial for us, especially in dealing with unstructured data. We spent about $10 bn to acquire this company. During the past two or three years, we have invested about $15 bn to acquire software and security companies as part of our Cloud strategy.
We acquired 3Com for networking, we also acquired storage technologies from 3PAR. We will continue to invest to fill in the technology gaps in our portfolio.
What part of your new business comes from DR and how do you plan to strengthen your presence in this space?
Business Continuity has become a critical function. Most large enterprises are conscious about keeping their data secure; this is also driven by a compliance mandate. Companies have realized the importance of having DR sites that are capable of 100% data center replication. They are not only looking at 100% DR, they are also looking at a secondary site for DR in the eventuality that if something happens to a DR site, then they still have a backup. Customers are paranoid and large organizations, including PSUs, have started moving into DR and secondary DR.
Large companies are investing as much as 30-40% of their IT budget on DR as it requires a data center and lots of bandwidth as, unless there is complete synchronization, the DR system will not work.
We have invested in federated deduplication technologies that have made DR faster. Our solution has the capacity to deliver backup performance of up to 100 terabytes (TB) per hour and data recovery of up to 40 TB per hour in a single system.
What are some key trends in the SAN storage space?
The next five years are going to be transformational. Today, most of the infrastructure is legacy, dating back to two decades when we had mainframe class systems. For this reason, the maximum amount of transformation is happening in storage and it is going to continue for some time as most storage vendors currently deliver systems that aren’t agile. 3PAR, a converged storage solution, on the other hand provides phenomenal functionality. It’s perhaps the only box available in the market that is 100% ready for the Cloud so that it can be used in IaaS or SaaS setups.
Virtualization was expected to percolate to the various layers of the infrastructure, starting with servers and then on to the storage. Are we there yet?
About a decade back the servers, storage, network and the management software were all running in silos and CIOs ended up virtualizing these components individually. Then they realized that they had virtualized pool of servers, storage and virtualized banks of networking, which did not communicate with each other. Enterprises need to understand that you cannot virtualize hardware a piece at a time, you have to look at the data center as a whole. At the same time, keeping in mind how virtualization is going to help in power and cooling and also from the management perspective, this was the rationale for converged infrastructure. Customers are moving in this direction but it is going to take a while as we are sitting on legacy infrastructure and applications and we can’t expect sudden and simultaneous rip and replace activity. However, wherever technology refresh is happening, the customers are adopting more virtualized environments and not just virtualized hardware and infrastructure is part of that environment.
