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Sweat storage for success in 2009
OGY Steve Pinder, principal consultant at GlassHouse Technologies, discusses how
IT managers can best deal with the growing volumes of data in the economic
downturn that 2009 will bring and what will be hot in the storage market over
the coming months.
TECHNOL
GE
In today’s information-centric that is already available but assets, easing capacity plan-
ORA
world, control of data is currently underutilised. ning and management,
ST
absolutely essential for the In the buoyant 2007 / 2008 IT increased disaster recovery,
majority of organisations. For market, many IT departments high availability protection
regulatory compliance, securi- ended up with terabytes of and so on. Virtualisation
ty and disaster recovery, busi- unused storage, but today projects tend to involve a rel-
nesses need to keep their this equates to an unneces- atively small cost for a much
data safe, regardless of the sary and expensive cost. greater return because they
state of the economy. Gartner Generally administrators have ensure that hardware is used
has predicted that by 2012, been afraid to reclaim storage more efficiently. It will be a
storage managers will install and SAN ports due to ineffi- key focus for many storage
six and a half times the quan- cient management proce- managers in 2009, but to
tity of terabytes than in 2008. dures. realise the desired ROI, they
It’s clear that storage will con- need to be sure that the strat-
tinue to be a significant In many environments there is egy, implementation and
growth area over the coming no standard procedure to ongoing management is
years as IT managers try to reclaim SAN capacity when a watertight.
deal with the unstoppable host is taken out of service.
data mountain and the This can leave many switch Thin provisioning will also
demands for immediate infor- ports cabled up but not being take off in the New Year
mation. However, in the more used with storage allocated to because of the continued
immediate term, IT managers a host that has been removed demand on hardware and
will have to cope with slashed or switched off. While software in the IT environ-
budgets and focus on doing reclaiming this ‘lost’ capacity ment. This allows storage
more with less and this trend may not allow a company to space to be easily allocated
will shape the storage indus- claim a refund, it does mean to servers as and when it is
try for the first half of 2009. that future purchases can be needed, to the right capacity.
deferred because ‘full’ net- It enables reporting and pur-
IT Infrastructure and works actually have nine to 12 chasing to be as efficient as
Data Management months of growth left in them, possible so that organisations
Budget pressures caused by which will save costs in 2009. do not suffer storage degra-
the recent economic downturn dation. Thin provisioning pro-
mean that cost saving will top 2008 was the year for server duces tangible business
the IT agenda in 2009. For virtualisation. In 2009 the results and really helps busi-
storage, this means IT man- industry will see a shift nesses to scale their storage.
agers will need to sweat their toward storage virtualisation
assets beyond standard not least because of the many Storage managers have con-
depreciation periods and well heralded benefits; stantly grappled with minimis-
make the most of hardware improving the utilisation of ing unimportant and duplicat-
FEB 09 WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
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