It's hard to comprehend the sheer volume of information which companies with an online presence need to store, manage, and access.
Businesses have often found that there comes a crunch time when they discover the systems they've cobbled together can no longer cope with the demand being placed upon them.
But how do you find the right solution, and one which will fit within your company's budgetary constraints?
According to IDC, the storage market in Asia/Pacific has been impacted to varying degrees by the recent economic downturn, although this has varied by country. Its research has found that broadly there has been increasing interest in low-cost, shorter-term storage solutions.
"Many users still have the ongoing need for significant and regular increases in storage capacity due to the sheer growth of data," states IDC. "The limitation on expenditure budgets, however, has resulted in a short-term response to buy more low cost direct attached storage (DAS) or network attached storage (NAS) storage at the expense of deferred integration and management costs."
IDC has also found that there is greater awareness of the use of storage by organisations. Its research found that users in many organisations are beginning to see the storage resource as a competitive differentiator, rather than simply as a growing, necessary cost. "It will provide a key reason for user organisations to adopt network storage solutions that offer significant benefits in terms of data access, availability, and reliability to those users that can make a successful transition," according to the report.
Graham Penn, director of storage research for Asia Pacific at IDC says that as a company's e-commerce presence grows there becomes a need to have data available on at least three levels and replicated to minimise the latency in your system.
"You need to provide a lot of storage so whatever you are publishing is stored and accessible," he says. "These days the same data is stored anywhere between nine and 15 times."
Penn believes that for companies focusing on e-commerce it's mandatory they have a very sophisticated storage infrastructure in place.
He says one of the fundamental trends at the moment is companies introducing network storage infrastructure, to maximise availability and minimise business continuity issues.
And, there is also the need to assess what you're trying to achieve with storage, rather than just thinking about the individual products that are available.
David Templeton, marketing manager at vendor/integrator Storage Tek Systems thinks businesses need to look at some level of consolidation of their storage environment.
"Over many years a distributed environment becomes very difficult to manage," Templeton says. "What we're seeing now is it's not the storage costs that are the issue, it's the storage management costs."
As a result, Templeton believes businesses should be focusing on storage management. "When managing your entire storage environment often people look at the isolated costs of the hardware, and do not realise that's only a small part of the costs," he says.
"Unless they consolidate that, and share it, the costs to upgrade and that sort of thing are huge because it's very people intensive. People need to focus on reducing the management costs and not necessarily buying cheap disks."
Hi,
Outside the operational and IO aspects, there are also costs associated with all these technologies. I thought readers may also want to check out an article which discusses Costs associated with SAN and DAS.
http://capitalhead.com/articles/san-vs-das-a-cost-analysis-of-storage-in-the-enterprise.aspx
- Mike