Smarter Storage: A game changer

Sandeep K. Dutta, country manager, Storage, IBM India/South Asia

As the world becomes more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent, the amount of information generated by the people, technologies and objects that populate the planet is swelling to unprecedented proportions.

Digital data is being generated in mind-boggling amounts. This growth shows no signs of stopping. Data volumes in general are doubling every 18 to 24 months. At least one industry analyst expects annual worldwide information growth rates of 50 to 100 per cent to be the norm as businesses and economies recover.

And, in just three years, the world's annual IP traffic is expected to total more than half a zettabyte. (That's a trillion gigabytes-or a one followed by 21 zeroes.)

Dealing with that amount of data would be challenging enough; what makes it even more daunting is that information is not just growing, it is changing. Organizations are not only dealing with growth in structured data that is neatly stored in fields in databases. They are increasingly dealing with unstructured data, too.

Unstructured data comes from sources such as e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, blogs, web pages, images, audio files and video files - and it now constitutes up to 80 per cent of data. Because it does not conform to traditional formats, it requires someone or something to interpret it in order for it to be transformed into actionable information that organizations can use.

Those who are charged with managing this data face a complex challenge - one that simultaneously raises issues of how to keep the cost of data management low while keeping the reliability of information access high. What is required is an information infrastructure that helps reduce complexity and cost while at the same time providing reliable access to trusted, up-to-date data.

That is not easy: According to a recent survey conducted by IBM, half of business leaders said they do not have sufficient information from across their organization to do their jobs; and one-third said they frequently make major decisions with information they do not trust, or with incomplete information.

Only with the right infrastructure in place will the right information be reliably available to the people who need it to make the right business decisions.

The key: getting your data storage under control

At the heart of every single form of communication from the beginning of time is storage ... from cave walls to books to complex storage devices, the simple ability to store information for quick retrieval in a secure and cost effective manner is actually so much more complex today than it appears on the surface.

 

Gone are the days when storage was thought of as a mere repository for data. The ability to store, protect, retrieve and analyze storage in an efficient and cost effective manner will be the difference between success and failure for more and more businesses around the world.

Like the foundation of a house, your IT architecture is the platform that provides the right flexibility to address these astonishing data growth and usage patterns.

Inflexible IT architectures make progress difficult, if not impossible. IT staffs are stressed to the limit, using old processes and technologies to support many more users. Storage provisioning can still take days or weeks. As data grows, performance tuning, back-ups and storage administration take more time to manage.

Escalating complexity also increases stress on data centers. New applications are often added quickly, forming islands of information that propels the complexity of the existing infrastructures.

At the same time, application groups are clamoring for faster storage provisioning and higher service levels. The explosion of data is leading to an unprecedented growth in storage system requirements. Organizations are finding themselves managing many different types of storage systems, each with unique requirements and dependencies. This approach is simply unsustainable. To make matters worse, many organizations are under pressure to reduce their IT budgets.

Why Smarter Matters

IT budgets are likely to remain flat (or nearly so) for some time because of uncertainties about world economic conditions. This means that IT administrator headcounts are also likely to remain flat. Yet, continued explosive data growth as well as the number of producers of data (including sensor based) as well as increased number of consumers (those who use, i.e. consume, the newly-minted information) leads to the famous do more with less dictum.

However, that is not all. The possibilities for taking advantage of the multitude of benefits that the infrastructure can deliver remain grossly underdeveloped for two reasons: 1) More IT resources need to be diverted to innovation from operations, but that can only happen if the smarter infrastructure can save more administrator time than just having them tread water so to speak and 2) While innovation provides direction, the ability to leverage and make real those directions requires software intelligence that can enable the infrastructure to take the necessary actions.

Smarter matters, if the information infrastructure is to be exploited to the needed degree.