The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Storage virtualisation set to double

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Wednesday, Mar 05, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Storage virtualisation set to double

A. Saye Sekhar

It is likely to grow from present 22 per cent to 45 per cent by year-end

HYDERABAD: When you surf through channels on your television, little do you realise that the software works on virtualisation. What is virtualisation? Your TV has the capability of a fixed number (called logical name) of channels and you assign each number to your favourite channel (called physical storage). The mapping of logical name and the physical storage by integration is broadly called virtualisation.

Virtualisation is used in storing of a lot of data – be it e-mails, links of various websites, mobile phones, bank accounts, and several other transactions. The market for data storage is going to increase manifold, according to Basant Rajan, chief technology officer of US $ 5-billion infrastructure software company, Symantec.

The data is always stored in multiples of 512 bytes. Given the enormous storage requirement, annual storage growth is estimated to be at 60 per cent and there is a lot of duplication of data.

The duplication is in the range of 50 to 500 times of every copy. For instance, you are using Microsoft Windows XP – Professional edition. A large number of your colleagues (say 100) at your workplace may also be using the same. Usually, the required task can be accomplished by 10 copies of the edition, but it is 10 times duplicated.

Similarly, Government records, bank transactions, telephone bills, etc., would have multiple copies, which actually are not required. But all of them are stored in the virtual space. Typically, the storage utilisation is just 27 per cent.

Currently, world over there is 161 billion GB (giga bytes) of data and it is expected to touch 988 billion GB by 2010, according to IDC report.

External storage market in India is estimated to grow to US $ 300 million in value terms and 160,000 terabytes in volume terms by 2010. In 2006-07, India witnessed massive digitisation of data records (95 per cent of data generated by enterprises is in digital form). Most enterprises unstructured information is increasing between 60 and 200 per cent annually (IDG Management Survey).

Virtual storage reduces the capital expenditure. According to IDC report, virtualisation is likely to grow from the present 22 per cent to 45 per cent by this year-end with telecom, retail, IT/ITeS and banking, financial services and insurance, apart from the Governments making use of it.

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