What is NetApp's roadmap for 2013? ~ DIGITAL WORLD

Rajesh Awasthi, director- telecom and cloud service, NetApp India

Rajesh Awasthi: NetApp is committed to help the customers achieve the 'anywhere, anytime' data access, integrated data protection and security, and instant delivery and capacity elasticity. NetApp recently announced the launch of Agile Data Infrastructure technology - a single, integrated agile data infrastructure that is 'Intelligent, Immortal, Infinite'.

It is a platform, designed as layered modular components, that meets different workload, performance, protection, and compliance needs.

Intelligent: This is about bringing the world’s best storage efficiency and application-aware software tools to deliver impact faster than ever. Intelligence is also about shrinking the footprint of infrastructure needed for the growing volumes of data, without compromising performance.

Immortal: Immortal is about maintaining accessibility and quality of service so data endures over the long-haul as individual infrastructure components change and evolve.

Infinite: Infinite is about optimizing resources to accelerate business growth, whether you are scaling current services or developing new ones.

CIOL: What are the trends you see in cloud adoption amongst telcos?

Rajesh Awasthi: Challenging economic times are compelling businesses to achieve greater levels of operational efficiency and flexibility. However, we see telcos looking at cloud computing as a growth area and are investing in cloud infrastructure. For most of the telcos, cloud computing is an area for B2B growth.

Currently most of them are getting into infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and increasing skills in data centre practice. We have seen telcos assuring customers on security concerns by putting processes and deploying secure multi-tenant infrastructure utilizing NetApp technology like MultiStore and FlexShare in a unified storage environment.

CIOL: How will cloud actually create new jobs?

Rajesh Awasthi: With the adoption of cloud computing, new service opportunities would come in setting up hybrid cloud infrastructure. We would need more skilled-people for automation of the processes and IT service management. As per estimation from Asia Cloud Forum, India Public Cloud Market for India is approx. $183 million and growing at a CAGR of 40 per cent.

CIOL: What are your offerings for the public sector?

Rajesh Awasthi: Governments coping with Big Data and small budgets can rely on NetApp's expertise for flexible, efficient, and secure data management solutions.

CIOL: What are your expectations from Storage GRID version 9.0 in south Asia/India? How does this release have a competitive advantage over your competitors'?

Rajesh Awasthi: NetApp Storage GRID is a proven, object storage software solution designed to manage petabyte-scale globally distributed repositories of images, video, and records for enterprises and service providers.

It can provide:
Boundless scalability:
Scales to support petabytes of data, billions of files and objects, while eliminating physical storage boundaries.

Intelligent data management and retention:
Automates data lifecycle management, global data placement, and automatic data protection

Secure data retention:
Protects content through encryption and digital fingerprints, eliminating data corruption and tampering