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What are the storage priorities for CIOs, especially during the current
downturn?
Most enterprises have over capacitized their storage and have very poor
storage utilization rates. So, CIOs need to free up these capacities first by
adopting technologies such as storage virtualization, thin provisioning, and
data de-duplication. Savings achieved by deploying these technologies translates
directly in the bottomlines, giving CIOs the edge to justify and better
negotiate their future storage needs. So now is the time for vision and
leadership to improve storage utilization. CIOs are now on the path to improving
utilization to almost 65-70% with the help of technologies such as
virtualization. CIOs who have their house in order and have set benchmarks to
justify their investments are the ones who will emerge successful.
What are the current storage trends?
Storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning have gained popularity. A
lot of data gets copied as enterprises want to keep production running, hence,
do offline functions such as data mining, back-up, and replication. Dynamic
provisioning helps in creating thin copies of this data, saving large volume of
storage space. This also helps improve performance dramatically, as
unfortunately the disks are getting bigger but are not getting faster. So to
compensate for that, we have to do a lot of straightening across those disks
with the help of dynamic provisioning. Going forward, there are going to be high
performing SEDs and SSDs, and these will be very large capacity disks. With
virtualization, data can be moved non-disruptively across those tiers, based
upon performance requirements. We are also gradually witnessing better policy
management on the placement of data. Also, storage drives are getting bigger
with a couple of vendors introducing 2TB drives from the previously 1TB drives.
Also, the nature of the data is changing as increasing amount of data is
coming off the Internet and being hosted on clouds. Today, there exist various
types of clouds such as Googles messaging cloud, Salesforces SaaS cloud,
infrastructure clouds such as Amazon S3, social networking, and web 2.0 clouds
such as Twitter, etc. And each of them have different requirements in terms of
availability and security. Hence, they are also building highly customized
storage systems. Search is another area gaining prominence. We are witnessing a
desegretation of functions from what earlier used to be a single documented
system such as enterprise content management. Services oriented storage is
another concept that is emerging and will have similar collaborative benefits as
in an SOA infrastructure.
How high up the curve are Indian enterprises in adopting the latest
storage technologies?
Virtualization and tiered storage are very high on the priority list of
enterprises and many have executed a strategy around them. Even before tiered
storage was getting adopted in India, many enterprises had deployed centralized
enterprise storage and modular storage for different applications. Now,
companies in thebanking, IT services, and telecom sectorsare the three main
industries where these cutting edge storage technologies are getting implemented
very successfully. Now we are witnessing the next wave of adoption among the
second tier of banking customers, for disaster recovery, storage to storage
back-up and better integration with applications.
How can storage contribute towards building greener data centers?
At HDS, green encompasses how we build our storage products and components,
distribute them and dispose them. Based on our analysis and reports, storage can
bring in almost 15-17% environmental savings. 25% of this cost saving comes from
waste reduction and improving utilization; another 20% comes from reduction in
planned and unplanned downtimes and this serves as a significant contribution to
bottomlines. The third area of saving, of about 18-20%, comes from management
efficiency. Hitachi has set up a proof of concept data center in Japan using all
the latest concepts, and achieved a PUE of 1.6 which is the worlds best rating.
Priya Kekre
priyak@cybermedia.co.in
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