According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Asia/Pacific Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, India external storage market witnessed a historical year-on-year growth (in vendor revenue) and stood at 100.1 million USD in Q4 2015.
Large investments from Telecom vertical complimented by Banking, IT/ITeS, Manufacturing and Government drove these storage numbers in Q4 2015. Technology refresh, ERP upgrades, surveillance, digital transformation and 4G rollouts were the key workloads/ use cases for storage deployments in Q4 2015.
Increased adoption and acceptability of SSDs (Solid State Drive) over HDDs (Hard Disk Drive) was visible across verticals to primarily avail better performance, longer durability and power efficiency at an affordable price. Also, the ratio of SDD vs HDD in Hybrid Flash arrays (HFA) is continuously increasing to accommodate both capacity and performance in a single array. Adoption of All Flash arrays also increased significantly amongst Telecom, Banking and IT/ITeS verticals for their performance critical applications.
Another visible trend is to increasingly deploy and utilize technologies like software defined storage, virtualization, compression, de-duplication and thin provisioning due to an exponential data growth and to optimize the existing storage infrastructure at times.
Cloud based back-up/ disaster recovery solutions are also gaining traction across organizations to avail best in class services with minimal CAPEX. This is expected to cannibalize some portion of traditional storage revenues but will open up a new class of storage buyers as well.
According to Dileep Nadimpalli, Senior Market Analyst, Storage, “Flash storage adoption will continue to grow due to the performance advantages, continuous reduction in prices and to address the I/O bottle necks between compute and traditional storage layers.”
Gaurav Sharma, Research Manager, Enterprise & IPDS, says, “With the choice of different infrastructure options like flash, hyper converged, software defined, object based etc. available in the market at interesting price points and loaded with features, the storage market is sure to see an interesting phase where customers would look to find more ways of differentiating while choosing one of them. Plain vanilla criteria of either price or performance would not help them anymore in this cluster of products in 2016.”
EMC continued to lead the market and increased its market share significantly from 29% to 52% in Q4 2015. Except EMC, all other vendors witnessed a decline in market share as compared to Q4 2015. Niche storage vendors are slowly getting into the consideration set among organizations due to the cost advantage and flexibility that can be offered by them.
The external enterprise storage systems market is expected to grow in single digit in terms of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2015–2020. Major spending is expected from Telecom, Banking, multiple State Government surveillance projects, Defence and various Central Government ministries in near future.
