Today’s enterprises demand 100% availability and fast access to
mission-critical information and data. The scenario is quite evident as we can
see corporate data volumes skyrocketing and growing between 75% and 150% every
year. This explosive growth in the use of information has been fueled by
e-commerce, e-mail, feature rich multimedia applications, etc. True that
corporations the world over are turning into e-businesses but the problem lies
in management, delivery and storage of the huge amount of information that is
perpetually flooding corporate databases.
Storing
this huge amount of information is another story, but the strategic value comes
from how well an organization can access and use it to maximse business value.
Thanks to the advent of the Internet, all this is quite possible. But come to
look at it from a broader perspective, the Internet has given even the smallest
competitor a presence. As a result one has to continuously find out ways to
reinvent oneself and reach out to the customers.
This competitive pressure has made IT the new production platform. In such a
scenario, Gartner noted that Storage requirements claimed almost 70 percent of
the total IT budget of companies. So feel the others like Meta group and IDC,
which pegs the data volumes to the tune of 57,000 petabytes by the year 2004.
Besides, management and delivery of mission critical data, storage solutions
must deliver customer-retaining levels of performance even during peak demand
periods. Storage must be available on a 24x7 basis to prevent revenue-draining
downtime.
Therefore, today’s IT architectures should be designed to build an
enterprise view of the business by integrating applications and data, creating
rich, no-wait customer experiences, leveraging Web and e-commerce data to
improve customer value as well as managing fast-moving business dynamics. As far
as storage systems are concerned there is good news as well as bad news. The
good news is that enterprise data storage is getting cheaper by the day and
prices are falling at 35-40% per year.
The bad news is that managing stored data and storage devices is a very
difficult and costly affair. No wonder that IDC estimates that management of
stored data and storage devices could account for as much as 80% of most
organizations’ IT budgets.
Other factors that add to the pain are the use of server-attached storage
resources and back-up response time. Server-attached storage devices provide
islands of information as the data is often stored in stovepiped databases,
inaccessible to many. Recent studies indicate that half of the server-attached
storage remains unused because it can’t be shared. This type of storage
architecture is also hard to manage since no centralized control is possible.
Besides corporations are conducting business round the clock and consequently
large amounts of data get amassed by the hour. Therefore, enterprises need
extended time to make back-ups of data and this brings about the question of
availability.
Such a situation calls for moving away from isolated storage environments to
a networked storage environment. This shift entails a complete rethinking of
storage strategy and architecture.
When I look at availability, it translates much more than
"availability" itself. It has to do with the performance and
scalability and providing the right type of information resources to the right
people. Following such a strategy one has to move away from the concept of
planned outages. If the storage system and the rest of the network cannot
support delivery of data to every user who needs it on demand, there’s no 100%
availability.
Conclusively, to create competitive companies, they must be able to capture
data and turn that into knowledge with business relevance. In order to transform
data to knowledge, they should need to create systems that store, process and
safeguard data for the entire enterprise. This is possible only by building a
robust and scalable IT infrastructure that delivers high availability and
performance.