Cloud, virtualisation shift the storage paradigm

The resilience of the storage market has provided a platform for new reseller opportunities, as Brian J Dooley finds

By Brian J Dooley, Auckland | Wednesday, 25 August 2010
In New Zealand, most IT professionals have developed a generalised range of skills without the depth of knowledge that is enjoyed by specialists. In storage, small and medium size businesses have quickly adopted the newer technologies with built-in automation to compensate for the lack of special expertise in the area.

“New Zealand IT professionals have always been quick to identify changes in the technology market that can provide real benefits and adopt these quickly,” says Patterson. “We saw this with the adoption of virtualisation and now with this change to the storage systems we are seeing a similar acceleration in adoption.”

For resellers, the trends towards server virtualisation and automation of storage provide new opportunities to demonstrate value-add to customers. Resellers can now offer complete solutions to smaller customers and they can help medium-size businesses transform from an IT model of layers, to a consolidated, virtualised and automated environment.

“The proliferation of cloud and managed services is a challenge for all customers in deciding strategies for today, and in future,” says Patterson. “This new paradigm for consumption of IT will challenge our industry from the ground up - and the reseller has the opportunity to advise, consolidate these services and help the customer adopt them and gain best value from them.”

Another vendor with a strong storage focus is Hitachi Data Systems. “The growth rate of storage and the demand on storage infrastructures continue to intensify as we are bombarded with videos, emails, images and other data on a daily basis,” says ANZ presales and solutions director Adrian De Luca. “As a result, the storage market has been particularly resilient over the past year showing positive growth. Unlike the server market where replacement can be deferred, the need for storage continues to grow in organisations. Customers have been looking to technologies like thin provisioning and data deduplication to slow down the rate of growth in their organisation and to keep budgets under control.”

The cloud is capturing overwhelming attention from organisations. As vendors and services providers announce their offerings, customers are starting to evaluate their options in running IT on a traditional procurement-and-maintenance model, or shifting less critical applications into the cloud. In response, over the past 18 months Hitachi Data Systems has been investing in making its solutions “cloud ready” by announcing enhancements to its complete set of hardware and software solutions.

“We are now seeing storage as a service evolving out of the large enterprise and government arena and into the lower end of the market,” says De Luca. “For example, Hitachi Data Systems announced a private file tiering service and public online storage offering with partner, Digi-Data to help organisations of all sizes safely tap storage resources in the cloud at their own pace.

Storage growth, inability to manage static or shrinking IT budgets and compliance/regulations in certain industry sectors are all immediate issues facing most organisations. Sales teams need to understand industry sector problems better and ask these leading questions

“Thin provisioning technology is being actively rolled out as the technology has matured and proven reliable,” says De Luca. “Data duplication in the backup and secondary storage environment is also getting traction with customers replacing legacy tape libraries with de-dupe appliances incorporating low cost SATA/SAS disk or rolling out the functionality into their backup software products. An emerging driver is reducing power consumption and reducing use of valuable real estate in the datacentre. The cost of powering and cooling the datacentre continues to rise sharply - once seen as an insignificant cost of the datacentre, it is now starting to bite organisations that have a sprawling infrastructure.”

Compellent is a specialty international storage vendor operating in New Zealand. The Compellent vision is what it calls the “Fluid Data environment”. A Fluid Data environment ensures the automated movement and management of information to adapt to changing business conditions and changes in the virtual data centre infrastructure. It is a dynamic storage architecture, capable of being adjusted automatically as business processes evolve and as new applications or virtualised servers are added to the network.

“With data storage growth exploding and the many consumers and business organisations looking towards new technologies and services to meet their future capacity, the Compellent SAN, storage capacity, servers and applications can be automatically provisioned, deployed and adapted in response to changing business conditions or the deployment of new applications,” says ANZ director Craig Stockdale. “In combination with server virtualisation platforms such as VMware and Hyper-V, storage capacity can be dynamically allocated based on policies the systems administrator sets, so that the appropriate amount of storage is reserved for business-critical applications allowing servers and applications to be deployed quickly.”

Compellent virtualises storage at the disk level, accelerating data access by spreading read/write operations across all drives so multiple requests are processed in parallel. “You can create high performance, efficient virtual volumes in seconds without allocating drives to specific servers, without complicated capacity planning and without performance tuning,” says Stockdale. “Remove the limitations of physical drives and dynamically change and scale your virtualised pool without disruption or downtime.”

An immediate growth phase in storage is being driven by technologies like virtualisation and mobile technologies, driving data growth in the enterprise and new services via the cloud.