'SME's Expects Scalability & Affordability from their IT Infra'

In a conversation with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet, Syed Masroor, Director – Flash storage, DELL EMC explained the growing flash storage market and trends in the storage domain. He also emphasized on the fact DELL EMC’s focus towards SMEs.  

Excerpts:

How is the flash storage performing in the market?

2016 is the Year of All-Flash for primary storage and today’s enterprise customer wants to enable their business with modern data centers that deliver agility, efficiency and speed. With rich data services, incredible reliability, and universal support, the new range of products and updates re-defines the modern data center.

How is DELL EMC exploring the flash storage market?

DELL EMC has been continuously aiming to enable these organizations to meet the demands of today’s mission-critical workloads with the high performance and massive capacity. Recently, DELL EMC announced that the XtremIO All-Flash Array (AFA) has surpassed another set of customer and revenue milestones, with DELL EMC further solidifying its position as the all-flash market leader, amassing a 40% revenue share according to IDC, nearly 2.5x its nearest competitor.

What are the key attractions of flash storage that the market is getting hooked to Flash Storage?

Today, market is witnessing demands such as more agility and better performance. Flash storage as a technology and specially Dell EMC’s solution exactly offers the these two elements – Performance optimization and increased agility towards business operations.

What are the most sought after demands of CIOs of enterprise or SME organization?

Increasing agility and enhancing performance are two major demands. In case of SMEs, they want to achieve both these factors at an affordable price. CIOs do not want something complex

We offer the optimized solution through our product portfolio of flash storage solutions. From the perspective of SMEs, customers are expecting better services. They do not want to invest their resources in building infrastructure for their small organizational perspective. That’s how, cloud based solutions are becoming well accepted. Overall be it enterprise or small business, flexibility, agility and scalability are three needed issues. And opex model which is becoming possible with the advent of cloud based solutions is becoming highly acceptable. DEL EMC is working on all these areas.

Hybrid cloud solutions and other technicalities related to cloud solutions often acts as a challenge. How do you look at this trend?

On premise model of flash storage is possible. We have a very robust and strong solution for hybrid model. However, DELL EMC’s integrated file tiering to the public cloud (including Virtustream), along with intelligent and predictive analytics through the new CloudIQ cloud-based storage analytics platform

How SMEs are accepting flash storage solutions? What relevance this segment has for DELL EMC?

SMEs also want their data to be protected as safely as any large organization would like to. A lot of solutions are available for data security but at DELL EMC we have solutions which are applicable for SMEs. Since we understand the issues of this segment, we at DELL EMC also firmly believe that these SMEs of today can become large organizations of tomorrow. Our solutions are tailored for SMEs.

Which are the industry segments that you are targeting?

We are focused on several industry verticals, mainly government, telecom, BFSI are some of the verticals that we are targeting. We are in the belief that modernization of IT infrastructure is needed everywhere.

What is the approximate storage market size?

Approximately, the SME’s portion of storage market should be in the range of 100 million USD and the overall storage market is estimated to be 300 Milion USD.