Seagate tapping the cloud storage market opportunity in India

As the world is going digital, the demand for Cloud storage is on a steady rise. Cloud segment is showing an upsurge, especially because of the Indian start-up sector. Throwing more light on this, Sameer Bhatia, Country Manager for India & SAARC - Seagate Technology in a chat with VARINDIA shares how Seagate has been tapping the growing cloud market in the country and about its offerings that has been helping both its partners and customers to grow their business multifold -

How has been the demand for Cloud storage in India? What kind of growth you foresee in this market?

With the world going digital, the demand for Cloud storage is on a steady rise. In India, cloud storage is predominantly driven by infrastructure development and huge expansion in the Internet’s reach, along with policy initiatives such as Digital India. Cloud segment is showing an upsurge, especially because of the Indian start-up sector. This sector is spear heading the momentum gained in previous years and is expected to continue on the high-growth trajectory. According to a study by Deskera, a global cloud-based software provider, the Indian public Cloud market could reach $1.75 billion by the year 2017.

The growth projection in this market is very encouraging. As we have witnessed an exponential growth in the adoption of gadgets, we see a considerable rise in the usage of cloud services. The upswing Cloud market promises well for the IT industry, as start-ups and enterprises explore ways to cut costs, enhance bottom lines wherein data security becomes of paramount importance. These developments also predict well for application developers since the cloud provides plenty of room for innovation, while at the same time cutting the output cost.

Kindly give us a brief about Seagate's Cloud offerings.

Companies are storing massive amount of data in hyper scale infrastructures. Considering the growth of mobile devices, need to real-time data transfer and the data created from IoT devices, the capacity and performance requirements for enterprises will only continue to grow. Enterprise and cloud service customers must manage and move the information, while improving response time.

Seagate Enterprise HDDs are purpose-built for a multitude of applications, workloads and storage tiers to maximize storage efficiency. The largest portfolio of HDDs means companies can choose from the highest capacity possible, and from a selection that meets overall business performance capacities.

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 12TB is the perfect example. This drive incorporates several technology advancements developed to address a critical requirement that hyperscale customers face in this age of exponential data growth: the ability to locate and organise the increasing amount of unstructured data they possess and make it available quickly and reliably for customers. Seagate’s 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is precision engineered to accommodate 550TB workloads annually. It has a market leading MTBF (mean time between failure) of 2.5 million hours and is designed to operate 24/7 for five years in the most rigorous enterprise data centre environments, delivering far greater reliability and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise storage products in the industry.

Seagate also has solid state drives (SSDs) which are as promising as the HDD portfolio. Seagate offers one of the broadest SSD and flash portfolios on the market to meet a wide array of enterprise storage needs. These solutions come with consistent IOPS performance with low latency, has optimised power for active workloads and comes with enhanced enterprise reliability and data protection. The 1200.2 SAS SSD comes with the highest level of reliability & scalability and is equipped with industry leading storage density. This drive has been optimised for high read intensive work loads and provides increased reliability. The Nytro XF1440 and XM1440 NVMe SSDs comes with an industry leading storage density close to 1.92 TB, is optimised for mixed workloads & read intensive applications. This drive comes with a hot-swap capability for easy deployment and serviceability without downtime.

What are the growth drivers for the growing Cloud market in the country?

India continues to be a prominent market for cloud technology adoption and public cloud. Public cloud, under which a third-party cloud service provider makes resources like applications and storage available to the general public over the Internet, is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 34 per cent and touch $3.9-4.0 billion by 2020, according to consulting firm Zinnov.

Cloud computing also helps companies to get rid of potentially expensive costs of purchasing, managing and maintaining on-premises hardware and software infrastructure. India has humongous SMB base, around 53 million SMBs. Zinnov Management Consulting also analyses that nearly 10 to 15 million of them are using some kind of technology solutions for their business, and the base of SMBs for which technology is relevant continues to increase, with the fundamental readiness around the Internet, smartphones, basic infrastructure, etc.

The vibrant SMBs/start-up landscape and government initiatives are further expected to increase public cloud technology consumption in the near future. IT/ITeS vertical accounts for 35-45 per cent of the total public cloud spending. Massive investments in data centres by technology vendors for banking, financial services and the insurance segment, is driving cloud adoption. Other sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, retail/e-commerce and telecom are also becoming major segments adopting cloud services.

With an increase in third party cloud service provider that makes apps and storage available to public, how Seagate is tapping this opportunity?

Cloud services have been rapidly expanding into every sector, owing to the ease of access of information, anytime and anywhere. The growth of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to rise at 49.2% in 2017 as per a recent Gartner’s cloud Services Forecast report. Similarly, software as a service (SaaS) will grow at 33% while platform as a service (PaaS) is expected to grow at 32.1%. The increased growth of cloud services shows the rising amount of data which needs to be available through cloud services.

As a result of the high adoption of cloud services globally the data center market is also expected to grow at a CAGR of close to 11% between 2016 and 2020. Rise in digitization and cloud computing among organizations have necessitated the construction of data center facilities across the globe. Though cloud computing involves higher computational power it enables flexible, scalable, and efficient business operations, which has led several growing medium-sized enterprises also to opt for efficient data centers.

These enterprises run their operations through cloud service providers (CSPs), colocations, and web hosting cloud data centers due to benefits such as scalability, reliability, and cost reduction. These requirements have propelled the use of cloud data centers or mega data centers.

Understanding the data management challenges of top cloud providers Seagate’s engineers have worked closely with the world’s largest cloud providers and OEMs to gain a deeper understanding of the data management challenges they face. With these insights our engineering team has implemented several new firmware and hardware innovations. Data storage innovations and in return these have led to dramatically improved business results.

What are the technological innovations that are expected from Seagate in Cloud?

Seagate’s engineers have worked closely with the world’s largest cloud providers and OEMs to gain a deeper understanding of the data management challenges faced usually. This insight led our engineering team to implement several new firmware and hardware innovations to the helium-filled hard drives, resulting in the following key improvements -

Highly scalable hard drive storage that is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms.

50 percent higher capacity, which enables hyper scale customers to deploy over 10PB of high performance storage in a single 42U rack for the first time – maintaining current space, weight, and power consumption profiles.

21 percent increase in IOPs performance/watt perfect for next generation eco-friendly infrastructures.

20 percent increase in enhanced caching performance, which results in faster access to unstructured data.

These innovations enable customers to gain more control over unstructured data, store vastly more information and retrieve it more quickly than ever before without expanding the storage footprint in the data centre. By offering the lowest power consumption and lowest weight in the industry, the drop-in upgrade 12TB drive translates to a ground-breaking TCO for hyper scale customers.

What kind of benefits do your Cloud solutions offer to Partners?

The storage capacity demands are growing at a high speed. In recent years, we have seen significant growth of data creation and consumption, including the enterprise cloud market. Seagate is focused on developing the best-in-class drives and storage solutions to solve our customers’ most critical business problems as their storage workload gets heavier than ever before.

Navigating to find and build the right cloud infrastructure requires experience, expertise and wisdom. It’s not just about combining the highest-end component available, it’s about knowing what is needed, understanding why it is needed and using the optimal solution. That is why the channels and SI partners play a vital role.

We connect with our customers and partners in every local market through the Seagate Partner Program. Seagate has been continuously building cloud-specialist partner base through this program, providing comprehensive training sessions and seminars as well as working on co-marketing programs. Seagate also continuously educates partners about new opportunities and carries out regular training on the products and technologies that we are introducing, so that they are able to maximize their results by offering best and optimum storage solutions to their customers.

We see ourselves as not just a storage provider, but a business partner who can build the best-in-class solutions together. I am glad that our channel and SI partners see us the same way, by working with us from the first stage of projects to developing a solutions pipeline to provide consultation, establish systems and provide technical support.