Dear Friends!
Now, the business is back in action. Indian SMBs and large enterprises have opened-up their wallets—showing elevated willingness for investing more on IT. In a globalized and domestically integrated economic order, the need for creating reliable IT infrastructure has further increased. A host of business verticals including Telecom, Govt, BFSI, PSUs, education, power generation & distribution, auto component manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals have grown larger appetites for IT products & solutions. In such a scenario, the centrality of data-centres come up automatically.
For long, compute has been seen as the back-bone of any credible data-centres (which is true even today), but the growing volumes of important data—sometimes, statutory girdled data—is making the storage part of the overall IT infrastructure more tactical. Now, the data-centre topology is heavily defined by the capacity, efficiency, and intelligence of storage resources. Technologies such as NAS and SAN have been doing the rounds for quite some years now (SAN handles block-level data and NAS takes care of files-based data). At times, SAN and NAS boxes are clubbed together in a process known as SAN-NAS fusion. But, such mechanical handshake between SAN and NAS was not only devoid of much needed ‘organic coherence; the underlying cost factor was equally exorbitant. The cyber world was just groping for finding a cost effective solution where both SAN and NAS are brought together addressing all encompassing storage needs of SMBs and large enterprises. Then all of a sudden, the idea of so called ‘Unified Storage’ came up where SAN and NAS are populated on a single platform. With the emergence of sincere area of unified storage, the search for a viable, cost effective, efficient and reliable hybrid-storage platform ended. Since then the faculty of unified storage has never looked back again. In this issue, Digital Edge has tried to delve deeper into the broadening canvas of unified storage. From market prevalence of ‘unified storage’ to adoption of it by large corporates, we’ve analyzed the subterranean vibrancy of this technological proposition. Companies like NetAPP, EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and Tyrone offer comprehensive range of unified storage products solutions.
In this issue itself, we’ve captured the growing market of UTMs (Unified Threat Management) appliances in the country. Data-cantres are increasingly adopting unified threat management appliances—in many cases, UTMs are preferred over standalone security appliances. An array of firms including Fortinet, Cyberaom (UTM arm of Elitecore Technologies), CheckPoint, SonicWALL, WatchGuard and Astaro have been catering to the burgeoning demand for UTM appliances and integrated security market in the country.
On the other hand, India has been witnessing the growing market demand for portable HDD (hard disk drive) products. Today, most of the storage companies including Western Digital (WD), Iomega, Seagate, A-Data, Verbatim, Transcend and Imation have been offering a wide range of portable HDDs in the country. The portable HDDs have registered some of the largest market dynamism in the country. Digital Edge has made an endevaour for covering the portable HDDs market space.
While, the growing adoption of LCD monitors has stirred the display market like anything, here again, we’ve tried our best to project the potential and growth trends of LCD displays in the country. I hope this issue carries a plethora of enlightening information for IT Vendors, VARs (Value Added Resellers) and Institutional buyers.
Enjoy the reading!!

Md. Qaisar Alam
qaisar@digitaledge-india.com