Bangalore: International Data Corporation says India will witness a huge spurt in storage area networks (SAN) arena in the next five years with massive growth in data in the modern enterprise being the prime mover.

According to IDC's director for South East Asia Graham Penn, a major factor that is driving network storage in the Indian market is distance, as it is a huge country and distances between various offices of enterprises are enormous.

"This has necessitated an investment in networked storage infrastructure," said Penn, in Bangalore to attend the four-day Storage Networking Summit (SNS) that drew to a close on January 23.

Expressing bullishness about storage-networking scenario in India, BellSouth SSP said it believed India would replicate the US experience, in view of the presence of a large pool of development talent.

"India with its big pool of software development talent can easily hope to replicate the US experience as far as storage is concerned," said BellSouth business development manager Steve Zimba.

Zimba foresees that software development would play a major role in the storage scenario of the future.

Co-director of SNS and co-founder of Brocade Systems Kumar Malavalli emphasised the need for proliferation of SAN, especially in the small and medium scale business environment, in view of its importance and benefits.

PTI