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Businesses no longer buying storage to solve data problem

More enterprises understand that adding more storage disks insufficient to solve problem of data boom and have turned to storage innovation to achieve cost savings and efficiencies, notes Dell exec.
Written by Liau Yun Qing, Contributor

The business environment has driven companies to consider smarter storage technologies instead of simply purchasing more storage disk drives to address the problem of data growth, notes a Dell executive, while an analyst points to thin provisioning, data deduplication and tiered storage as some storage innovations enterprises should implement.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia, Amit Midha, Dell's president for consumer, small and medium business for South Asia, Asia-Pacific and Japan, said large global companies already understand it is not possible to solve the challenge of data growth purely by adding more storage disks.

"For global companies, [adding storage alone] is not even an option," said the Shanghai-based executive who was in town Tuesday for the Dell CIO Storage Forum. "[A storage architecture] needs to have network storage, storage management and compliance, where storage plays a big part in [supporting] document management and retention."

Midsize companies have also discovered the benefits of storage technologies. According to Midha, as IT budgets are not growing, companies would need to balance between purchasing storage drives or investing other technologies.

More companies are discovering that technologies such as network storage can not only save money, but also save on the human resources needed to manage the storage network, uptime and data retention cost, he added.

At the forum, Aman Munglani, research director at Gartner, recommended various storage technologies that organizations should consider including thin provisioning, data deduplication and tiered storage.

Thin provisioning allocates storage to an application so that it is "one step ahead" of storage requirements of the app, explained Munglani. In contrast, "thick provisioning" allocates more space than is needed to anticipate for future growth.

According to the New Delhi-based research director, by moving from thick to thin provisioning, companies can recapture about 30 to 60 percent of data space. Cost savings from implementing thin provisioning is "massive", he said, adding that it can drive down storage spending by 25 to 30 percent.

Data deduplication, which eliminates multiple copies of data in backups, "took a while" to be adopted in the Asia-Pacific, but those that did were able to enjoy 30 percent saving in storage space, he said.

Munglani also highlighted tiered storage as another technology businesses can look at. Historically, companies used high-performance disks for all storage-related activities. However, he said, data tiering allows applications that are non-critical to be run on cheaper, lower level disk drives. The Gartner analyst added that only a small number of apps actually require high-performing disks.

Public cloud storage still gloomy
In his presentation, Munglani also noted that few organizations were comfortable with cloud storage, preferring instead to wait for reference cases before embarking on such projects.

That said, some companies indicated they were using cloud storage as a low-cost storage option for backup and archival purposes as well as for applications that are tolerant of latency, he revealed.

According to the analyst, data security remained the biggest concern for companies with regard to cloud storage, but he noted that vendors were "doing a good job" explaining the security of these storage options.

By 2014, Munglani predicted that organizations would still prefer storage services running in a private cloud than public cloud, where the ratio of private to public cloud storage will be 5 to 1 that year as companies continue to "experiment" with the public service.

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