HP to Bring Cost-effective Storage to India
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, 28 Aug 2008, 1257 hrs IST

HP is planning to target the media and entertainment sector in India in a big way with its high-capacity storage solutions.

The IT hardware major recently announced its latest product -- the Extreme Data Store ExDS 9100, that it claims can scale from several hundred terabytes up to petabytes of storage.

Donovan Nickel, vice president of Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storageworks division of HP said, "There has been an explosion of content in the media and entertainment sector with a requirement for huge amounts of storage for photos and file-based data. Also the emerging business model requires large amount of storage at low cost. We intend to leverage this growing need in media, along with that in the telecom space."

HP announced the ExDS9100 earlier this year. The product is expected to be available in global markets by the end of 2008. The company intends to target "any vertical that requires large amounts of file data storage at least cost" Apart from media & entertainment, the target segments will be telcos, oil and gas, surveillance, pharmaceutical/life sciences, and healthcare.

According to Manoj Suvarna, country manager for Storageworks Division of HP India, "Several customers have expressed an interest in the solution and we are in the early stage of our discussions. Minimum storage requirement would begin at 246TB scaling upto several petabytes. Very few customers in India are currently at this scale, but will fast be there in the next 6-12 months."

The response in US & Europe has been quite high as they are already dealing with petabytes of data and this would be a viable solution, claimed HP.

Replying to a query on pricing of the product, Nickel said, "The price point has not been finalized but if traditional networked storage solutions range from $5-15+/GB, the ExDS9100 solution would be available around $3/GB. Official pricing will only be available at product launch later this year."


Related links:

HP Expands StorageWorks Portfolio in India