Cloud, virtualisation shift the storage paradigm

The resilience of the storage market has provided a platform for new reseller opportunities, as Brian J Dooley finds

By Brian J Dooley, Auckland | Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Other technology markets may shift and turn, but there is always a need for storage. Data usage and storage requirements continue to grow exponentially, and it all needs to go to disk, with optimal access, security and reliability. Storage vendors today seek to consolidate and integrate silos of storage, confront a wide array of virtualisation issues, and react to the cloud in its many guises - from storage as a service to the massive internal requirements of private clouds.

For resellers, storage provides numerous opportunities to develop a consultative relationship with customers, as well as opening the possibility of increased hardware and software sales. In recessionary times, companies seek to do more with what they have, with storage being an excellent area for improving efficiency and boosting performance at relatively low cost. Resellers need to develop expertise in storage technologies to meet the demands of emerging infrastructure.

Tighter budgets and strict regulatory requirements, coupled with the need for faster, more reliable access to information, are causing customers to re-think their storage environment, according to Phillip Martin, storage works business manager for HP in New Zealand. “The year 2009 was turbulent, with the tough economy forcing many IT departments to re-evaluate storage practices to cope with shrinking budgets. Many companies failed to identify the importance of an efficient storage strategy and the resulting costs were drastic. Exponential data growth coupled with new, powerful storage and server devices that demand more power and cooling are causing the perfect storm in the datacentre. At the same time, organisations face tighter IT budgets and fewer qualified staff, datacentre managers are expected to do more than ever.”

Though many believe the economic outlook for 2010 looks promising, there is still considerable uncertainty. This means companies need to change how they operate and position themselves for future business growth.

“Data storage is an issue that faces almost all organisations,” says Martin. “As the business grows, so does the amount of data needed to be stored on the network. IT departments, regardless of size, can expect data growth rates to increase 40 to 60 percent over the next year, even more so for companies implementing Web 2.0, cloud and high performance environments. If handled improperly, businesses can find themselves spending two to five times more in hardware and increased operational costs with five to six staff members managing several hundred terabytes of storage.”

For many organisations, the ongoing administration and maintenance of existing storage infrastructure can consume the lion’s share of their IT budgets. To accommodate data growth, businesses need to invest in highly scalable, flexible and cost effective technologies that efficiently manage increasing petabytes of storage capacity.

“By consolidating infrastructure management, companies can reduce IT expenses and increase efficiency by freeing resources to focus strategic business priorities rather than maintenance,” says Martin. “A converged infrastructure eliminates costly and complex siloed IT environments by unifying individual stacks of storage, servers and networking into a single virtualised environment, enabling businesses to focus on innovation and driving growth. Storage plays a critical role in the converged infrastructure by allowing clients to virtualise data and create a unified Virtual Resource Pool, which is instantly accessible for changing business needs.”

Maximising enterprise data storage capacity is more important than ever before. With the majority of storage budgets unable to keep pace with data growth rates, companies need to find ways to reduce capital and operating expenses.

“In general, before adding new capacity, companies should focus on making better use of their already installed capacity,” says Martin. “To accomplish this, companies can improve the efficiency of their storage systems using tiered storage and data classification. Storage virtualisation is a key enabler of non-disruptive data movement and tiering. It helps clients overcome the odious tasks of data classification and physically moving data between tiers.”

EMC covers the full range of storage, from SOHO to enterprise. “New Zealand companies are still experiencing a massive growth in the amount of digital data that they are keeping,” says local chief technology officer Arron Patterson. “An IDC survey predicts that the global amount of data will grow 44-fold in the next 10 years and, as the world will create and move more than one Zetabyte of data this year, it’s a problem that is growing rapidly.

“The future is to have storage systems that use Enterprise Flash Devices (EFDs) to provide cost and energy efficient input/output operation, and large capacity low cost drives for bulk storage; we are currently testing drives in the 3TB range. To enable this model of operation the storage system must dynamically monitor and control the use of these devices to provide both optimum capacity and performance. Allied to this, the amount of automation and the very nature of how storage is administered will change. Today, storage specialists understand workloads and I/O profiles and how to match them to RAID types and disk technologies. Tomorrow, the storage system needs to do that via automation, while the administrator sets and monitors policies that maximise use of the storage service for their specific requirements.”