By Nishant Arora
New Delhi, July 18 (IANS) At a time when Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with big data and video analytics, is the talk of every town globally, making sense of data and its optimum, secured storage is the key for the governments including in India, a top executive of US data storage company has said.
Increasing terrorist threats, cyber crimes and data breaches are driving investments in monitoring, security in IT and video surveillance systems in the country, said Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India and SAARC.
In an era of enterprise Cloud, NetApp that recently declared revenues of $5.6 billion for fiscal 2016, is seeking to capture a bigger pie in India with its top-of-the-line secured data storage and expertise in all-flash array market.
"At present, we are working with two Indian states and will soon deploy NetApp storage solutions in six to seven others. Our 'Smart City' campaign is centred on three key areas: citizen security, intelligent traffic management system (ITMS) and smart metering (of electricity supply)," Valluri told IANS in an interview.
According to market research firm 6Wresearch, the Indian video surveillance market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth of over 13 percent between 2016 and 2022.
Keeping this in view, the demand for efficient and reliable storage technologies is at an all-time high and the global data storage bigwigs -- EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Oracle and now NetApp -- are set to play a bigger role in India.
With us, "video data can be stored on solutions like SnapMirror -- software technology that provides fast, efficient data replication and disaster-recovery (DR) for critical data and SnapProtect -- that helps reduce the risk of data loss," Valluri informed.
NetApp expects to grow in the Indian market at a rate of 10-15 per cent every year.
"We are providing data storage solutions to some of the prominent banks in India like National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), ING Vysya, IDFC and Shamrao Vithal Co-op Bank Ltd. (SVC Bank)," Valluri noted.
The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has deployed NetApp's storage platform that provides cutting-edge video storage and analytics at 12 Indian airports.
"Aligned with its existing roadmap, NetApp Video Surveillance Storage platform (VSS) will support video monitoring and connect the 12 airports in real-time to COSAH (Committee of Secretaries on Aircraft Hijack) -- the apex government body situated at Rashtrapati Bhavan," Valluri told IANS.
With the deployment of VSS, NetApp provides efficient systems to manage world-class density and scalability of big data at AAI airports.
"With NetApp video surveillance storage platform, AAI can manage large volumes of video analytics and data to build a virtual infrastructure and better monitor important airports across India," Valluri said.
NetApp has also deployed storage solutions in police state video surveillance in the country.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement of establishing a 'Digital Locker' will trigger the volume of data responses. We are working from state to state on this. A lot of services will be rendered over government Cloud and a combination of government owned and public and private cloud and for this, our Data Fabric approach is the perfect solution," the NetApp executive added.
Data Fabric provides consistent data management, efficient data transport and the visibility to leverage the right IT resources, when and where you need them, says the company.
With the focus gaining ground to establish efficient data centres, the use of flash storage has begun to play a crucial role in the enterprise market in India.
"2016 is going to be the year of flash. As customers try to optimise IT performance while simultaneously balance their cost and agility at their data centres, new metrics for flash storage will be of great help and flash adoption, hence, will see an increase," Valluri told IANS.
NetApp registered a revenue growth of 238.2 per cent year over the year, which was 2.7 times faster than the all-flash array market as a whole, a report by the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) said last month.
All-flash array is a data storage system that contains multiple flash memory drives in place of spinning hard disk drives, allowing for much faster data transfer rates and more efficient use of data centre resources.
According to IDC, NetApp has moved to the second position from fourth in the tracker quarter over quarter, with 22.8 percent revenue market share -- ahead of Pure Storage, HPE and IBM. NetApp recently acquired leading all-flash storage system SolidFire with the promise of providing storage for the Next-Gen data centres.
"The data storage industry in India is adapting to better meet the growing storage needs contributed by drivers such as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud), IoT and Digital India initiative," Valluri noted.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
