TheHinduBusinessLine.com Interviews Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, Storage Works Division, Hewlett-Packard India

May 24, 2009

By D. Murali

From MB to GB to TB to … HP captures turning points in the evolution of storage …

How much information did we create in 2008? The equivalent of more than: 237 billion fully-loaded Amazon Kindle wireless reading devices, 4.8 quadrillion online bank transactions, 3 quadrillion Twitter feeds, 162 trillion digital photos, 30 billion fully-loaded Apple iPod Touches, 19 billion fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs … Thus informs a recent EMC-sponsored IDC study titled, ‘As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands.’ I’m sure this must be gre at news for those in the storage business. Such as, Prakash Krishnamoorthy.

He is the Country Manager, Storage Works Division, Hewlett-Packard India Sales P Ltd, Chennai (www.hp.com/in), and when we meet on April 16, I ask him, “From MB to GB to TB… Where are we headed to?”

In an era of information abundance, data sizes will continue to grow every day, observes Krishnamoorthy. “Today there are more computers, more servers, more applications, and more digitisation — all of which require massive storage capacities. We are already starting to define new capacity estimates for 1000s of TB and 10,000s of TB.”

For starters, 1024 bytes (that is, 2 to the power 10) make a KB or kilobyte. Keep incrementing the power by 10, and what you get are MB (megabyte), GB (gigabyte), and TB (terabyte). Further on are petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte. “Given good conditions, downloading a 1 YB file (of 2 to the power 80 bytes) over a 28.2 Kbps connection would take about 140 billion years,” he informs. Our conversation continues over e-mail.

Excerpts from the interview:

What do you see as the key drivers behind the seemingly insatiable appetite for storage?

The growth for storage is pervasive across all industries. Organisations are deploying …

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