Key considerations
When businesses move online, some of their storage needs invariably change as data needs to be accessed by their customers, as well as staff.
Graham Schultz, Australia and New Zealand regional manager of SAN infrastructure manufacturer Brocade, says there's a huge uptake of storage worldwide, with e-business being one of its drivers.
"The message here that I think is important is that this is going to continue--no matter what happens with dot-coms, no matter what happens with the economy--storage is growing and companies and e-business organisations need to start putting strategies in place to address what is going to be continued huge growth in this space."
"Online applications like e-business, CRM applications, data warehousing applications, ERP applications...these are very data intensive," says Schultz. "These are all contributing to the massive upswing in the amount of storage that is going to be deployed over the next couple of years."
According to Schultz, there's also a trend away from direct storage, towards SAN and NAS. "The bottom line is that people are seeing this infrastructure and this technology as a way of managing their storage. But, as importantly, making their business more profitable--better availability, better management, requiring less people to manage the storage."
Storage Tek's Templeton thinks organisations need to start looking at more cost effective ways of storing data, simply because they now have so much of it. He also highlights the importance of storing information from your Web site, both for business and legal reasons.
"If a transaction happens then the information needs to be stored for legal reasons for a number of years," he says. "The legality needs to be looked at and the availability and protection of the associated data also needs to be looked at.
"In that environment high availability is vital. Therefore there needs to be a storage infrastructure that can support that--organisations doing business over the Web can lose millions of dollars not to mention customers, if their system is unavailable."
IDC's Penn says e-commerce companies tend to have a relationship, in one form or another, with an ISP. Although some may choose to use their own resources, those with no particular skills in managing storage will find they get a better return on investment by outsourcing.
"Either way, companies have to make sure customers have almost instantaneous access to information and products," he suggests. "Customers should be able to do transactions and put it into some sort of facility where they can do intelligent querying and profiles. Typically that means companies don't just have a single facility."
"There are lots of issues to resolved depending on how ambitious you are in e-business."
There is also a trend for companies to take a wider view about what they're trying to achieve with the storage solutions they put in place.
Storage Tek's Templeton sees businesses starting to take a more integrated approach to dealing with their storage requirements.
"Companies are taking a more holistic approach with storage rather than going out and buying a piece from Vendor A and then Vendor B," he says. "My advice would be to take a holistic approach, and not an isolated application by application approach. This is much more efficient [when] it comes to funding."
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