Storage Virtualization: is India ready for it?

Storage virtualization has become the next trend in securing more utilization of the on premise infrastructure.It is said that less than 15 percent of the hardware capacity is used at a given processing time. As a result, there is a huge opportunity in terms of storage virtualization," says Srivathsa Vijay, IT Head of Torry Harris. However, the demand in India is still nascent for the growing trend. Telecom operators are quite keen on adopting to the new ways of infrastructure utilization improvement, while the other sectors are still hesitant in deploying it.

So, what is storage virtualization? In simple words, an array of attached servers which has unused storage capacity, is used by the administrator to abstract the unused space and the space are clubbed in a virtual environment to be run as a separate virtual machine. "More than other sectors, telcos are keen as they need to maintain a low infrastructure cost," says Srivathsa. There is a need within the operators as the low-tariff war has hit their revenues and if they tend to opt for a hike in the tariff, there are all possibilities of losing a huge chunk of their subscribers.

Now, the storage virtualization seems good, with a lowered infrastructure cost within an easy to manage virtualized environment. However, where is the catch? There is a considerable set up cost and during the implementation process if the best practices are not adhered to, then the operational success of the virtualized environment would hardly be possible. Moreover, the need of storage virtualization is in such organizations where the amount of data and the work load is always on an increasing curve. "So telecom and banking segment are the best areas to be targeted, however BFSI being quite strict with their data protection, it will take time for them to take up storage virtualization," says the IT head. With the need of the storage virtualization being concentrated to those who may have two Storage Area Network, Logical Unit Numbers and more than 1 TB of data, or tiered storage requirements, it can be seen that India will take time to catch up with the technology as a huge chunk of the country's business is SMB dominated, whose needs of storage virtualization will stand at minimum to nil.