The first edition of this series was held in New Delhi, distinguished speakers from companies like EncloudEN, Red Hat, QSAN and Veeam showcased and demonstrated their software and hardware solutions at Data Technology Solutions
Western Digital and CRN India recently organised the first edition of “Data Technology Solutions” (DTS) conference at Crowne Plaza, New Delhi. The forum was dedicated to discuss how with the accelerating rate of data, storage requirements are exponentially increasing. Streaming data, video, artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML), IoT, and more will drive private data stores into the exabyte range over the next decade. Moreover, speakers of EncloudEN, Red Hat, QSAN and Veeam showcased and demonstrated their software and hardware solutions at DTS. These ecosystem partners work very closely with Western Digital for giving end to end storage solutions in the enterprises space.
The event attracted as many as 50 focused storage service providers and system integrators. Western Digital has long been at the forefront of game changing innovations. From the invention of the first hard drive to recent advancements in 3D NAND, the journey of Western Digital continues to break new grounds in the storage space.
The forum started off with an opening keynote by Vivek Tyagi, Senior Director, Enterprise Sales, Western Digital – India and South Asia. He spoke about how the continued, unabated growth of data and its strategic value is driving a transformation of IT infrastructure as never before. As the enterprises are undergoing digital transformation and, in the process, treating and leveraging data as a strategic capital asset, they are increasingly investing in new technologies to drive IT infrastructure modernisation. He shared a plethora of storage solutions from WD catering to the growing need of digital transformation, stemming from cloud architectures, software-defined storage, the convergence of compute, and the growing adoption of flash.
He also outlined the business strategy for changing role of channel ecosystem – from simply box movers to value added solution providers. Tyagi pointed out how channel can tap the growing opportunities in tech areas like big data, IoT, AI and other emerging technologies.
The next keynote speaker of the evening was Prateek Garg, Founder and CEO-Progressive Infotech. In his presentation, Garg shared that despite the data rise, the lack of data silos is blocking the digital transformation. “Regardless of the type of data silo/data source they all present a common issue with a lack of broad scale data availability. Consequently, this limits the value we can extract from the data we collect, despite the significant investments made in collecting the data,” he said.
Furthermore, he emphasised on importance of data integration and availability. “Organisations should need to achieve data availability across these silos leveraging modern, scalable architectures enabling AI/ML technologies. Realtime data access through scalable, open standards technology are the key areas where customers need service providers to help them in solving their tech challenges,” he stated.
The next speaker was Manpreet Ahluwalia, Regional Sales Manager North, Western Digital, who highlighted the wide range of enterprise storage portfolio and platforms spanning high capacity and high performance that covers end to end solutions from access, transform, transport and to preserve data. He further talked about how emerging workloads driving storage requirement diversity to cater to the software defined infrastructure environment. The highlight of his presentation was introduction of OpenFlex, a modular storage building blocks unified on a single fabric.
After the comprehensive presentation by Ahluwalia, Abinash Saikia, Co-founder and Director, Enclouden was the next speaker. He started his session by providing some insights about the company. He stated, “The Indian market though has several players that operate under a services model, they do not have a full product suite like ours. Therefore, it occupies a niche that can be used to full advantage. Today, the company facilitates on-premise private cloud as a better alternative to public cloud, consolidation of IT workloads with private clouds, deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), delivery of IT for users in a bring your own device (BYOD), among others. It is the perfect cloud engine for today’s enterprises, equipped with a complete set of tools to deploy, manage, monitor, and orchestrate a private cloud-based IT infrastructure.”
Shubham Dhar, Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat focused on Red Hat Ceph Storage solution which is an open, massively scalable, simplified storage solution for modern data pipelines. Engineered for data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and emerging workloads, Red Hat Ceph Storage provides software-defined storage of choice to customers with having industry-standard hardware. Dhar said, “With increased automation of data management and data placement activities, Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 helps infrastructure teams evolve from storage-centric to service-centric operational models, to serve a larger cross-section of applications and stakeholders.”
Vishal Gupta, Senior Systems Engineer, Veeam spoke about Veeam collaboration with Western Digital that integrates Veeam Universal Storage API with IntelliFlash all-flash arrays Plug-in family. Users can effectively access, transform, capture and preserve data in innovative ways. This combination is expected to deliver robust storage solutions to accelerate enterprise applications on cloud platforms.
Gupta explained how emerging applications including the likes of AI, IoT, and ML tools call for a robust storage system. With the new solutions, the company attempts to meet these requirements.
Following Gupta, Limton Xavier, Technical Engineer, Western Digital presented a glimpse of technological partnership, both software and hardware storage freedom WD enjoys. He shared how WD product partnership with software players like Red Hat, Suse, Veeam, Vmware, Microsoft, Veritas and more are addressing the storage software needs at the organisation. On hardware storage front, WD has partnership with Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, and many others.
The last speaker for the evening was Jaganathan Chelliah, Director Marketing, Western Digital, who unveiled the special Western Digital Elite Partner Program. “This program is for enterprise SIs and VARs who provide complete storage solutions to the customers. It is an annualised rewards program with quarterly rewards based on performance for the channel partners who sell Western Digital Ultrastar HDDs, SSDs and storage platforms and server portfolio that includes our JBOD, JBOFs, Ultrastar Serv24-A, and Ultrastar Serv60+8,” he mentioned.
The event concluded on a high note. The audience showed great interest and spirit in playing an online quiz based on the speaker’s presentations. The first winner of the quiz was Nishant who won 1 TB of SSD card. Lastly, the main attraction of this event was Mitra, a humanoid robot assistant who was the co-host, along with Sandhya Michu, principal correspondent of CRN and Express Computer.
If you have an interesting article / experience / case study to share, please get in touch with us at [email protected]
Awesome! Information. Great work thanks