Symantec recently unveiled a major release of the Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 product family, which attempts to provide scalability and reliability coupled with the breadth of heterogeneous support demanded by large enterprise data centres around the globe.

Rohit Ghai, VP Engineering, Storage Foundation, Symantec talks to Biztech2 about the Veritas CommandCentral 5.0 family.

What kind of heterogeneous support does this product have across different platforms?

The product has a server component and a managed host component. The server side supports both Solaris and Windows environments. On the managed host side, it supports almost all platforms that enterprise users are implementing.

With virtual environments becoming more and more relevant, we are beginning to manage these environments. In terms of the x86 environment, we have added support for Vmware as it is clearly the market leader. As other virtual environments on the Unix, or non-x86 environment are getting more popular, integrating support for them is on our roadmap.

What investment would enterprises be looking at to deploy this product?

In terms of infrastructure investment to roll out this product, enterprises need to deploy one management server, which can be either a Windows or Solaris server. As these management servers typically handle a heavy load, they need to be fairly chunky servers. If you look at it from a management perspective, large data centres generally have over 3000 servers. So 1/3000th of the entire server side investment is a very small investment towards a storage management initiative. Thus the storage per server cost is miniscule.

More importantly the investment needed from a customer is a dedicated person, like a project manager to manage the deployment project effectively.

How long does an average deployment take?

There are 4 phases in any deployment and our key mantra is that that there is value to be derived in each phase of the deployment. At every phase that you complete you have tangible ROI. We typically measure a metric called Time-to-Value. From a visibility standpoint, your SAN administrator will have the insight to make meaningful decisions within 2 days. If you talk about going the whole mile, variables like the procedural structure, operational practices and coordination between the operational teams of an enterprise come into play. Therefore it’s different for each customer and depends on the company’s storage environment.

What kind of value/ROI would this product bring to CIOs?

This product clearly has the capability of offering the maximum ROI in the SRM space as most other products tend to solve a specific problem and are not focused on storage management. Today, storage is 25% of enterprises’ IT budgets. If you reduce your storage utilisation by 20%, it works out to 5% of your entire IT budget. These are staggering figures and indicate that the potential from an ROI perspective is huge.

Typically we find that customers experience 100% ROI in a 6-8 month timeframe.

What, in your estimate, is the market size for an SRM product in India?

A Gartner estimate states that the global market for SRM products is in the $800 million range today and is growing at 15% annually. Indian enterprises comprise a large chunk of that global estimate, so the market in India for SRM products is huge.

In addition to this, I feel that the Indian data storage management market is also very under-penetrated and it’s still evolving. Thus this market presents us with a great opportunity.

Are your products intended only for large enterprises or are you targeting SMBs as well?

The more complex the environment, the more value addition our product can bring. However, our key focus happens to be the larger customers. We prefer to look at our customers from a data size point of view rather than a company size view. We generally start at a 10-20 Gigabyte data size on the absolute lower end and on the higher side we are looking at Petabytes of storage, as one management server can handle 6 Petabytes of storage.

What kind of response have you received for this product in India/abroad?

Over the past two and a half years, the whole storage management arena has matured. The technology has been around for some time, but the relevance of this technology has now been accentuated. One of the primary factors for this is the amount of data growth.

The second factor is that initially SRM products were being adopted on the premise of ROI and optimising capacity. As thin provisioning is a growing trend globally, the demand from the financial and telecom verticals is primarily reduction in the time taken by an administration team to provision storage. The operational efficiency dimension has also been accentuated over the past few years.

The data centre management group is one of our highest growth areas. If you were to separate interest in the product by vertical, financial companies are really interested because of the huge data growth associated with the financial sector. Energy and telecom are also verticals that have shown enormous interest in SRM products. Finally the technology sector has been a laggard as compared to the other verticals, but is showing strong interest now.

The response from Indian enterprises has been very strong. As we have NDAs with most of our customers, we are not at liberty to talk about them. ICICI Bank, which is one customer I can talk about, have done an extensive deployment of this product.