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Consolidation and management of storage attached to servers either internally or externally (through DAS); consolidation of backup and recovery for multiple servers; compliance/regulatory audit requirements for data storage and retention-the trio represent the three most acute pain areas for CIOs in India Inc, especially in the SMBs category, with regards to the storage infrastructure in their enterprises. This seems to be the most pertinent learning accrued from the “Making Storage Simple for Growing Companies” series of seminars organized by EMC in association with Dataquest in eight cities spread across the country.
Covering cities as diverse as Chandigarh, Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore, Ahmedabad, Pune, Kolkata, and Hyderabad, the event brought forward the concerns and challenges faced by CIOs of relatively smaller organizations in managing their growing repository of information. It also debunked the popular myth that unlike large enterprises, SMBs are not overburdened with huge volumes of data-while 12% of the attending CIOs were handling data in excess of 1TB, a whopping 41% were managing between 100-1000 GB of data. What is contributing to the generation of this huge amount of data? Like the big brothers, here too e-mails constitute the biggest chunk, with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino being the most preferred options. ERP from SAP and Oracle as well as OLTP/RDBMS from Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server followed in the pecking order of business critical applications.
This influx of data has ensured that even SMBs have gone in for large-scale storage infrastructure deployment. Traditionally, though they tended to invest in DAS leading to the creation of a stovepipe architecture over time, there is now an increasing shift away from DAS towards Automated Network Storage (ANS), primarily catalyzed by the growth of IT applications. Says Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India and SAARC, “Automated Network Storage, mainly NAS and SAN, allows organizations, especially the growing ones, to reduce the total cost of ownership, through consolidation, control, capacity utilization and centralized management. Doing away with information silos not only lowers management complexity, it also makes information more accessible across the enterprise.”
Other than consolidation, DR and BCP proved to be two of the biggest drivers of storage purchases amongst the SMBs in India. While 27 CIOs already had a DR plan in place, another 208 were looking to establish one in their organizations-140 of them would like to do so this year only. It was obvious that even growing enterprises today have realized that their methodology to manage and protect their information would decide their strategic competitive advantage in the long run. That in turn ensures that they would continue to invest in storage as the strategic block of their IT infrastructure.
Even regulatory compliance, especially in terms of data retention, is another emerging issue with the SMEs, one that is impacting their storage deployment. While 98 CIOs currently have compliances/regulatory requirements that mandate their data, 100 need their data to be retained for more than 10 years, 42 for 5-10 years and 39 between one and five years. Dealing with this deluge of data, and extracting, protecting and storing the information contained within, is something that every CIO is learning today. That is because archiving is only part of the problem, the more serious issue concerns access.
This rapid accumulation of fixed content demands a new category of storage designed for the secure, online storage and retrieval of such information for years and years-Content Addressed Storage (CAS). Rather than access a data object by its file name at a physical location, a CAS device uses a content address to store and retrieve the object. Because content often accumulates without any upper limit, a CAS repository must be extremely scalable, while maintaining a sub-second access performance.
Source: Dataquest
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