The explosion of data would be one of the biggest worries across the world in 2013, while increasing cost of storage would be another concern.

These global trends would also be mirrored in India to a great extent, according to Hubert Yoshida, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer with Hitachi Data Systems.

Yoshida is also a blogger and his Web diary is ranked among the top 10 most influential in the industry.

“In a sense, it will be a challenging year, because of the overall economic scenario, and as some things are yet to settle in the US. In India, I see growth, I see a plenty of opportunities here, as you don’t have the issues that are there in other countries,” he said in an interaction with Business Line .

Big data

Globally, big data will be backdrop for most of the trends in 2013. “When we talk about big data, we are seeing volumes that are so big that we won’t be able to back it up, we won’t be able to make copies of it and put applications to….”

Another issue is the velocity, meaning the speed at which data can be captured. Fast fibre networks and Internet protocols are required to capture data, and once data are captured, the next thing is to search and access it.

“So we have to do a query rather than crawl a directory in metadata,” he added.

The cost of hardware is trending upwards and becoming a greater share of the total cost of ownership (TCO). Prior to the emergence of Storage Area Network, the hardware part of the storage was expensive and storage was about 50 per cent of TCO. Another emerging trend is the new consumption models for storage. “One of the biggest wastes is the way we buy storage space. Most people buy storage at today’s price for the next four to five years,” he said. Organisations will only buy what they need and when they need it.

Replication issue

Replication of data is another issue. “Backups are the biggest creators of data. We believe that a lot of backups are not being updated for the last many years, and 80 per cent of them are stagnant. So we are advising our customers to archive it, put it into a constant platform, instead of backing it up”.

“In India, the mobile market is transforming and we see the country going from e-governance (electronic) to m-governance (mobile) and that will generate a lot of data and information,” Yoshida added.

rajesh.kurup@thehindu.co.in