The world today is about flash drives, networked storage powered with intelligence and virtualisation as Rajesh Itagi, director, client services, EMC explained at a knowledge session at the C-Change 2008 here today.

He termed smart storage, security and intelligence as the three main drivers for a powerful information infrastructure that a CIO today looks for.

Extending the realms to networked storage, he said that there are many fresh areas that enrich storage.

"Five 9's available on arrays, tiering, energy and data efficiency, ease of use and virtualisation thin provisioning are some key ones."

Organsiations will adopt the pay as you grow model, he said, as he explained the rationale of thin provisioning.

"You have to provide the right amount of resources for an application, neither extra nor less. But at the same time, a pool of resources has to be kept ready for seamless use as and when required."

It is times today to write off traditional storage devices like tapes and hard drives. While the former are slow, not reliable and come with problems on data consistency and restoration; the latter are wrought with wear and tear, noise and delay that comes with the typical mechanical movement.

 "Hence, flash technology is all set to revolutionize storage.

He added that organizations need to ensure information protection with proper attention to areas like operational recovery, disaster recovery, recovery time objective, cost etc while two-way authentication and multi-level encryption have to be addressed to ensure security.

He also touched upon areas like tackling unstructured information, archiving, virtualisation and rich-repository functionality that together make up a robust information infrastructure for a CIO.

(pratimah@cybermedia.co.in)