By Peter O’Connor, Area Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, NetApp
The current economic climate has called for businesses to rationalise their operational costs and this has created an opportunity for clients to demand greater value from their IT investments.
More 2009 predictions
In the age of economic rationalisation, NetApp continues to champion the concept of doing more with less. Technologies that will help organisations improve their storage efficiencies such as deduplication and virtualisation will continue to remain a high priority on a CIO or CTO’s agenda. The Gershon Report will begin to have an impact on the way government acquires IT as the report’s recommendations find their way into policy and procurement methodologies. Gershon’s proposition to centralise IT management, support shared services and ultimately reduce cost will drive the demand for large data storage services within government.
This scenario paves the way for solution providers who can offer more for less to be the big winners in 2009. Vendors who can show customers how they can spend less for effective and reliable data storage can expect to see significant growth in 2009. The total cost of ownership will have a greater focus as enterprises deal with the economic impact of the global downturn. Solutions that can be scaled up or operated with minimal intervention and management will be highly favoured.
NetApp expects the demand for professional services consultants to increase as organisations rely on experts and achieve greater efficiencies. NetApp worked with a large financial services customer to consolidate their storage requirements using a Shared Storage Framework and this resulted in huge productivity and cost savings. Companies will start to realise the implementation of a Shared Storage Framework will be an integral component towards addressing increasing volumes of data.
As the digitisation of data continues to increase the need for storage, deduplication technologies have a primary role in helping enterprises manage the rampant growth of storage through the virtual infrastructure growth. NetApp sees the trends towards developing a virtualised storage environment will signal the end of tape as backup technologies and strategies change over time.
Archiving will have a revitalised focus as organisations seek to maximise the value of data storage and manage the cost of the storage growth. Besides meeting compliance requirements, NetApp believes the focus on archiving will be driven by Exchange as more companies migrate to Exchange 2007 and look to manage the storage demands driven by email traffic and the need to store larger email attachments.
With emerging technologies, we are likely to see more Flash/SSD integration into traditional storage environments and a continued focus on the integration of Fibre Channel and Ethernet environments (FCoE) into the Unified Communications environment. Social networking will be a significant driver of data storage and content security. As the demand increases for smaller footprints and reduced power consumption, we expect to see continued higher capacities in drives which draw less power.
The environmental agenda will drive organisations to demand for products that have a smaller environmental footprint. New products that have higher capacity drives which use less power to operate will be in high demand as companies work towards reducing their carbon footprint.
In a challenging business environment, more companies will re-examine their IT infrastructure and use it as an opportunity to be more agile and responsive.