IT service provider Dell India delivers a wide range of storage solutions for the small and medium businesses (SMBs), said the company's Advanced System Group Director in  SMB Division, Satyen Vyas on Wednesday.

Addressing a press conference organized by Dell India in New Delhi on Wednesday, Satyen Vyas, Director – Enterprise, SMB, said, "As the hard drive becomes bigger in size, it is not possible to keep the storage updated. Storage is the biggest by-product of business today. Data continues to keep growing."

Currently, average consumers routinely tote hundreds of gigabytes of data with them everywhere they go. For instance, an IDC study reports the digital universe is growing faster at a rate of 60 percent and is projected to be nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes) in 2010, a 10-fold increase over the next five years.

Dell has the most comprehensive storage portfolio in the industry across DAS, NAS, SAN and back-up solutions. Dells's strong partnership with EMC has enabled the company to offer strong Fiber Channels (FC)-based solutions. Dell is also playing an eminent role with Equal Logic and providing the best Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) storage solutions.

Opining further, Vyas also said, "Storage resides in our desktops and laptops. But from an organization perspectives it resides in the servers. In the long run as the organization grows and the number of employees grows...and the data keep growing. But sooner or later any organization will need to look at the file sharing, application sharing and back-up."

In fact, today many government agencies insist that the organization should be able to store and retain their business data for few years. At the same time as the data is growing it is becoming as an important part of the business. Any downtime available on the data is going to have severe impact in the business prospects," he also added.

He also mentioned that Dell provides storage services for low utilization, stranded capacity , Consolidation/virtualization, improving IT efficiencies and availability of data protection, business continuity and compliance are vital for business growth.

The challenges for Dell in storage solutions are managing storage growth, back-up administration  and management, managing complexities, managing costs, and IT team training. Also, Dell storage has three strong brands which includes power vault, equal logic, Dell/EMC.

Swati Sasmal, Senior Director-Research, Access Markets International (AMI) Partners also added, The manageability and reliability for storage facility are the need for SMEs in India. Small businesses depend fully on Channel partners or resellers for storage. Technology adoption as a tool is complex for them to comprehend.

Today the storage hardware market all over India is around Rs. 1,583 crore where SMBs contributes 31 percent and other 69 percent. However, individually SMBs storage hardware market is around Rs. 484 crore, she added.

Further, Sasmal also added that 50 percent investment of SMBs goes in to building infrastructure. SMBs typically adopt ICT solutions in an evolutionary & sequential manner. In fact, 38 percent of the small businesses are using Dell's PCs.

And, the total SMB IT spending in the year 2009 has been around $9.93 billion which includes networking 6 percent, IT services 12 percent, storage 6 percent, Internet 14 percent, security 3 percent, computing 51 percent, software is 8 percent, she added.