New SNIA Chapter in Malaysia

The Storage Networking Industry Association for South Asia (SNIA SA) have formed a new chapter of their organization to represent Malaysia.

Until now, SNIA South Asia has seen the majority of the demand for educational content come from the Singapore region, but with emerging economies and a rapidly increasing interest in storage technologies, there have been many requests for representation in other countries, the most prominent of which has been Malaysia. IDC have predicted that Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) ICT spending will grow by 7.7% over 2010, and with no obvious slowdown in the volume of information being stored, it is a perfect opportunity for SNIA to advance its mission by expanding the availability and awareness of data storage technologies. Customers in Malaysia will now have access to SNIA's storage standards and best practices as well as a comprehensive library of vendor-neutral, educational white papers and presentations on all storage related technologies. SNIA South Asia will also be working with their colleagues in Malaysia to map out a program to extend the SNIA Storage Networking Certification Program (SNCP) and to introduce storage training and certification to the region.

"This is a natural step in our evolution, and we welcome all our friends and colleagues in Malaysia," said PK Gupta, Chair of the SNIA South Asia. "We are seeing increased demand for our services from storage professionals in Malaysia who need a better understanding of the technology but would prefer not have a vendor bias. SNIA is the only source of such knowledge. We will be the primary source of vendor-neutral education for South Asia."

Heoh Chin-Fah, Technical Director at Real Data Matrix Sdn Bhd, the driving force behind the development of SNIA Malaysia, was equally enthusiastic about the opportunity. He said: "We have been working on this project for a while and we were keen to ensure that when we approached SNIA South Asia that we did so with the full recognition of the Registrar of Societies, and with the backing of a number of large storage vendors in Malaysia. I'm pleased to say we have achieved both of those objectives and we are now excited about the prospect of implementing our first set of initiatives and persuading more companies and individuals to join us."

Wayne Adams, Chair of the SNIA commented:" The Asia Pacific region continues to be one of the world's largest growth areas for data center storage and SNIA over the past several years. Global redistribution of IT services and operations in our world has enabled Malaysia to be recognized as a part of this trend. SNIA's IT professional educational programs and standards for storage management, energy efficiency, and cloud data management services are integral building blocks for Malaysia's data center storage operations and IT infrastructure."