The Hindu : Business : NetApp to expand Bangalore centre

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 15, 2006

Business

Business

NetApp to expand Bangalore centre

Anand Parthasarathy

Indian engineers fashion the very fabric of storage networking

STORAGE SOLUTION: Dave Hitz, Executive Vice President, NetApp, at the inauguration of the company's new Bangalore development centre on Wednesday.

BANGALORE: Some of today's most significant enterprise storage solutions to emerge from Network Appliances (NetApp), the U.S.-based leader in this field, can be traced to the efforts of the company's Indian developers, founder and Executive Vice President David (Dave) Hitz said here.

Taking to The Hindu, soon after inaugurating NetApp's enlarged, 18,000 sq. metre development centre here earlier this week, Mr. Hitz said new and emerging products in the networked storage arena like Data Fabric Manager (a centralised storage manager) and Net Cache (the ability to keep virtual copies of the most used files, close to where they are needed) were hundred per cent developed here.

The Bangalore centre's current capacity to house 750 professionals was being ramped up to accommodate 1,200 within two years and this would be backed by a $150 million investment, Mr. Hitz said.

While tape-based storage will continue to play its role in archival applications, disks were clearly the way the storage industry was headed, Mr. Hitz felt.

This was particularly so in the entry level where disk-to-disk back up offered a cost effective solution for swift access and recovery after a disaster situation.

"Tape is cheaper than disk — but it is not ten times cheaper. It would have to be, to displace disk in many situations.''

For an emerging storage networking scenario like India, the big news, according to Mr. Hitz, was the ubiquity offered by Internet-driven solutions like iSCSI (Internet protocol Small Computer Systems Interface). This was not as fast as fibre optic channel but in most cases was an acceptable solution, riding on the cheaper Internet backbone, Mr. Hitz added.

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