Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi recently 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 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.

“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 vice president and general manager, 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.”

The Indian market is the most mature in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies and the highest usage levels of converged systems. 50 percent of respondents in India are using or planning to use cloud storage in the next 6 to 12 months. 30 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.

Other key highlights include: 

1. Having access to accurate data on a timely basis key to gain 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.

2. Virtual server sprawl remains a key concern. 70 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.

3. Justifying storage investments is a key challenge as budgets remain tight. 60 percent cited aligning IT costs to business budgets and growth as a main challenge to adopting their IT strategy amid current market conditions.

4. 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.

5. Managing email is getting more difficult and expensive. 60 percent of respondents in India cited concerns over the rising costs in managing email growth.

“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.”

Source: Information Week