Vodacom battles to maintain low data costs due to exponential data growth and increasing electricity tariffs.
Ermano Quartero, Vodacom managing executive of products and marketing, said during a Symantec and Vodacom round table held yesterday: “The amount of storage in Vodacom Business's data centre environment has exceeded our data expectations by 20%.”
According to Quartero, the cost of running a data centre has increased substantially due to the steep tariff hikes imposed by Eskom. In addition, an increase in storage demand means Vodacom has had to invest in technologies such as virtualisation to keep power costs down.
“We've adopted virtualisation which means that out of 1 000 square metres, Vodacom can get six times more hosting, and power consumption is significantly reduced,” Quartero noted. He added that infrastructure-as-a-service saves costs on power and skills and predicts that in coming months, more organisations will adopt this methodology.
“As communications costs have come down, more data is being consumed in SA. This implies more South African small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) can perform like those in first world countries, by deploying more power-hungry applications, which means more storage is needed.
“They now have a massive increase in cost demands and it makes sense for them to look at third-party providers to store their data for them.”
Symantec regional director for Africa, Gordon Love, explained that 69% of SMEs have increased their data storage budgets.
According to the Symantec 2010 State of the Data Centre study, released this week, 82% of enterprise respondents cite the increase in demand for power and the rising cost of electricity as the prime driver fuelling business decisions to adopt green technology.
Sheldon Hand, Symantec storage specialist, noted that enterprises generally do not manage their storage effectively. The security giant found enterprises are only using between 20% and 30% of their actual purchased storage.
“The reason that it's so underutilised,” explained Hand, “is because enterprises purchase storage in silos and overprovision by purchasing five times the storage they need and deploy it on day one.”
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