According to research from Forrester, storage professionals continue to face flat budgets when compared with the previous year. While vendors delivered newer solutions incorporating solid state disk (SSD), automated tiering, and cloud.
Shiva Anand Neiker, storage sales leader for IBM’s systems & technology group shared these findings from Forrester Research on the benefits of storage virtualisation.
Firstly, the technology helps reduce storage management and administration cost, said Neiker. “This allows a core group of administrators to control multiple assets across a distributed storage environment, where you have 50 per cent efficiency improvement,” said Neiker.
Secondly, users are able to improve capacity utilisation of existing storage assets by some 30 per cent, and with that, “you can control the growth of future spending”.
Thirdly, IT leaders can capitalise on being able to purchase the lowest cost storage resources, with “controlled growth on average by 20 per cent,” said Neiker.
Still on the topic of storage virtualisation, Scott Drummonds, director, infrastructure and virtualisation specialists, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC, shared his organisation’s vision in this area.
“The future about virtualisation is going to be of self-service,” said Drummonds. “It is the same way people are deploying cloud by setting up policies and allowing customers to self-service.”
With virtual machines lending a helping hand in provisioning, “we are going to construct storage based on policies that is going to self-service deployed,” he said.
IBM’s Neiker and EMC’s Drummonds took part in the next debate session, which focused on the newer iterations of virtualisation including storage virtualisation. Both speakers shared their views on case studies as well as strategy and key benefits for storage virtualisation implementations.
Storage Optimisation
Saravanan Krishnan, director, platforms & solutions business, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, shared with the audience a metric-based approach called storage economics that explores cost reduction opportunities within storage infrastructure.
“Price-per-TB is the wrong metric in making storage decisions. There are hidden costs everywhere including labour and maintenance,” said Krishnan.
The process identifies some 34 types of costs, measures unit cost baselines, isolates direct and indirect costs and determines cost owners, and maps costs to investments that can reduce costs. Unit cost reduction and ROI can also be predicted.
The last presenter of the day, Subramaniam Venkatesan Balaji, storage practice leader, TS consulting, APJ region, HP, shared with the audience a case study on how US-based Ceva Logistics employed HP’s 3PAR to consolidate various legacy storage systems.
“We managed to reduce storage capacity by 67 per cent with 3PAR’s thin conversion technology,” said Balaji. The legacy six storage boxes was cut down to just two, and the exercise eliminated the need to rent additional hosting space in its Jacksonville data centre.
The completed project reduced administration efforts from 40 to 60 man hours per week to one hour per week. 3PAR now offers more granular data protection and backup capabilities. The logistics provider’s data centres in Jacksonville and Houston now backup to one another with remote copy taking just four hours.
The final debate session between Hitachi Data Systems’ Krishnan and HP’s Balaji focused on optimising storage growth and management within organisations. The duo covered various approaches for storage optimisation including tiering, deduplication, compression and capacity optimisation.
In his closing remarks, IDC’s Piff summarised the event thus: “The key takeaways are alignment with the business and understanding what the business requirements are. Manage the data with consolidation, virtualisation and automation.”
