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Consolidation, DR and regulatory requirements are driving the
adoption of storage infrastructure amongst SMBs
Consolidation
and management of storage attached to servers either internally or externally
(through DAS); consolidation of backup and recovery for multiple servers;
compliance/regulatory audit requirements for data storage and retention-the
trio represent the three most acute pain areas for CIOs in India Inc, especially
in the SMBs category, with regards to the storage infrastructure in their
enterprises. This seems to be the most pertinent learning accrued from the
“Making Storage Simple for Growing Companies” series of seminars organized
by EMC in association with Dataquest in eight cities spread across the country.
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| Yograj Verma, Dataquest, on
why data will become the nightmare for SMB CIOs |
Manoj Chugh, EMC |
Covering cities as
diverse as Chandigarh, Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore, Ahmedabad, Pune, Kolkata, and
Hyderabad, the event brought forward the concerns and challenges faced by CIOs
of relatively smaller organizations in managing their growing repository of
information. It also debunked the popular myth that unlike large enterprises,
SMBs are not overburdened with huge volumes of data-while 12% of the attending
CIOs were handling data in excess of 1TB, a whopping 41% were managing between
100-1000 GB of data. What is contributing to the generation of this huge amount
of data? Like the big brothers, here too e-mails constitute the biggest chunk,
with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino being the most preferred options.
ERP from SAP and Oracle as well as OLTP/RDBMS from Oracle and Microsoft SQL
Server followed in the pecking order of business critical applications.
This influx of data
has ensured that even SMBs have gone in for large-scale storage infrastructure
deployment. Traditionally, though they tended to invest in DAS leading to the
creation of a stovepipe architecture over time, there is now an increasing shift
away from DAS towards Automated Network Storage (ANS), primarily catalyzed by
the growth of IT applications. Says Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC,
“Automated Network Storage, mainly NAS and SAN, allows organizations,
especially the growing ones, to reduce the total cost of ownership, through
consolidation, control, capacity utilization and centralized management. Doing
away with information silos not only lowers management complexity, it also makes
information more accessible across the enterprise.”
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Learning
1: Other
than consolidation, DR and BCP proved to be two of the biggest drivers of
storage purchases amongst the SMBs in India
Learning 2: Debunking the
popular myth that SMBs are not overburdened with huge volumes of data. 12%
of the attending CIOs were handling data in excess of 1TB, a whopping 41%
were managing between 100-1000 GB of data. |
Other than
consolidation, DR and BCP proved to be two of the biggest drivers of storage
purchases amongst the SMBs in India. While 27 CIOs already had a DR plan in
place, another 208 were looking to establish one in their organizations-140 of
them would like to do so this year only. It was obvious that even growing
enterprises today have realized that their methodology to manage and protect
their information would decide their strategic competitive advantage in the long
run. That in turn ensures that they would continue to invest in storage as the
strategic block of their IT infrastructure.
Even regulatory
compliance, especially in terms of data retention, is another emerging issue
with the SMEs, one that is impacting their storage deployment. While 98 CIOs
currently have compliances/regulatory requirements that mandate their data, 100
need their data to be retained for more than 10 years, 42 for 5-10 years and 39
between one and five years. Dealing with this deluge of data, and extracting,
protecting and storing the information contained within, is something that every
CIO is learning today. That is because archiving is only part of the problem,
the more serious issue concerns access.
This rapid
accumulation of fixed content demands a new category of storage designed for the
secure, online storage and retrieval of such information for years and years-Content
Addressed Storage (CAS). Rather than access a data object by its file name at a
physical location, a CAS device uses a content address to store and retrieve the
object. Because content often accumulates without any upper limit, a CAS
repository must be extremely scalable, while maintaining a sub-second access
performance.
Rajneesh
De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in
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