Simon Elisha, Chief Technologist for Hitachi Data Systems, Australia and New Zealand looks into his crystal ball to reveal the storage strategies and technologies that enterprises will adopt in a tough market environment.
2008 was a challenging time for many businesses. The economic downturn witnessed in the later part of the year is resulting in decreased IT spend with companies looking forward to just stay afloat rather than expand during this turbulent period.
Although business is slowing down, in contrast data continues to grow unabated driven by increased information usage by end-users, emergence of Web 2.0 applications and compliance. It is interesting to note that whilst the price of storage has been on the decline, the overall cost of storage in the form of real estate, power and cooling costs as well as infrastructure maintenance and management costs continues to rise causing headaches for CFOs and CTOs alike.
Companies are reaching capacity with data centre space and power supply which has a knock on effect for infrastructure decisions. Businesses have to challenge the current storage and data management strategies to find new ways to do more with less. Deduplication played a large role in this and received a lot of airplay in 2008. Storage tiering also took centre stage, with increased focus on tier 2 as a source of growth and cost. Businesses focused less on the actual management of their data storage and more on IT solutions to help with its running.
If 2008 was the year of realising problems and looking at solutions, then 2009 is the year for action and implementation with a focus on optimising their storage infrastructure. The economic slow down has turned the Australian climate from a rapid investment culture into a rapid cost saving culture.
In 2009 many business practices will need to change. 2008 saw the close of an economic boom and 2009 will see purse strings tighten. Companies will aim to squeeze more value out of their existing assets whilst looking at adding capability.
Although many businesses will be looking to scale down the rate of IT purchases through 2009, some technologies and solutions will flourish due to their direct impact on the bottom line and the business savings they can create.
Doing a Double Take on Data Deduplication: While data deduplication moved quickly from discussion to implementation, in 2009 organisations will realise that there is still a home for tape in their backup environment. In some cases the cost of data deduplication does not always merit the solution, making a 50/50 mix of disk and tape the preferred option for 2009 and beyond. Many organisations will start product testing with real data to ensure promises are met in terms of efficiency. Businesses will also more frequently request commitments within contracts referring to the levels of deduplication that can actually be met.
Going Beyond a “Pragmatic Green” Approach: The increasing cost of power, lack of available data centre space and imminent Carbon Trading scheme will put increased pressure on organisations to implement tangible green IT strategies. While most organisations have adopted a “pragmatic green” approach to date, Government departments will lead the Green IT agenda in 2009 by implementing best practices that deliver benefits for the environment and the bottom-line. Financial organisations will quickly follow suit.
Feeling the Skills Squeeze: Organisations will shed or freeze headcount in their IT departments, making easy-to-use technologies that allow IT professionals to ‘do more with less’ paramount. With the economic downturn comes the greater availability of highly skilled IT staff. Progressive organisations will use this to their advantage to make hires in 2009 that will position the company for growth in the future. Businesses will retain the best staff they can but will look for dramatic departmental efficiencies. Despite data’s continued growth, head counts will be on the decrease.
Deciding to Defer, Defer, Defer: Deferring IT projects will become the norm in 2009 as the economic downturn worsens. Technologies like thin provisioning and storage virtualisation will continue to grow in popularity as organisations turn to technology to get more juice out of their existing infrastructure and defer future IT investments until tough times improve. Progressive organisations will use 2009 as a time to get their house in order and implement IT projects that deliver a measurable ROI.
Introducing Annoying Archiving: Data archiving will become sufficiently annoying, especially in large organisations as the growth of unstructured data continues to escalate. In 2009, organisations will start to view archiving as a strategic rather than tactical activity that unlocks the value of information to the entire organisation. Active archiving solutions will become more integral to an organisation’s information management initiatives, and many organisations will move there their tier two storage to this archival tier.
Without the luxury of additional capital, enterprises will need to focus on getting more out of their storage assets in 2009 and reducing operating expenditure chiefly by improving utilisation of their assets. Enterprises will need to be more strategic in developing their storage strategy and the economic downturn is an opportune time for them to look at doing this.
