A relatively new technology is arriving in India and Bangalore has taken the lead in organising the first major event on it - the storage networking summit, attended by some of the global experts in the field, which will be on till the 23rd.

Just as mainframes have given way to servers and distributed processing, independent and dedicated data storage systems are giving way to networked and shared data storage which is hugely scalable and cost effective.

Ashok Soota, CII president and a leading IT personality in his own right, sees in this new business opportunities for Indian IT.

To reap these opportunities there is a need to get into the positive reinforcing cycle of a new technology giving birth to new applications which in turn will create new demand.

The new opportunity in data management requires data to be stored, managed, mined and protected and the platform for this is storage area networking.

The opportunity for India is two-fold - product realisation, and mining of data and remote servicing through BPO.

Kumar Mahavalli, cofounder of Brocade and one of the global leaders in the technology, sees the big challenge before storage area networking as the need to take it to ‘the masses,' by which he means small and medium enterprises which have neither the resources to access costly technology nor the expertise to handle complicated systems.

For that SAN had to develop a robust ecosystem of its own.

For India as a whole there was clear advantage in being a greenfield area and a countrywide network could be developed by filling in the gaps that exist.

A common infrastructure could be provided by service providers. To be robust SAN has to provide applicability (facilitate running of applications), scalability and flexibility.

Players will have proprietary skills in niche areas within a multi-vendor and multi-delivery environment where everyone will be able to operate through standards and templates.

For this vendors will have to adopt the holistic approach of systems integrators.

The benefits that will accrue from this will be cost reduction, storage and server consolidation, simplification, flexibility, automatic system recovery, improved return on investment and reduced cost of operation.

Another leader in the field, Dave Hitz, a founder of Network Appliance, echoed the same theme of the need to make the technology robust and affordable and focused on how convergence of technology had created new paradigms.

His mantra for players was to have core competencies, select partners well (as NA partnered Oracle) and focus on business solutions. The latter in fact was the culmination of a ten-year process.

A decade ago storage solutions were only for small groups of 10, available through ethernet products.

After three years came scientific applications and in the last three years have been added commercial and database applications.

Ten years ago networks were a hundred times slower than disk drives. Today the two work at roughly the same speed.