Companies will be expected to manage between 40% to 60% more storage in the coming year, and will likely be asked to do this with less budget because of the global recession.
This is according to research by Symantec, which was revealed during last week's Data Centre Optimisation event sponsored by Symantec's partner, 3PAR.
“The average storage capacity is extremely underutilised, with only 30% being utilised. 3PAR can bring that figure up to between 60% to 80% storage utilisation,” says RJ Weigel, 3PAR vice-president for worldwide field operations.
Weigel was visiting SA to meet with local channel partners and customers to raise awareness around utility storage.
According to Weigel, SA is no different from other regions from the perspective that SA is officially in a recession and businesses are looking to do more with less with their current resources.
Weigel explains that utility computing is a key technology in tough financial times because it has become more difficult for companies to increase storage spend and increase the amount of electricity being supplied to data centres.
Tough markets, tough times
“Utility computing, as a whole, can drive down total cost of ownership. The immediate availability of applications, scalability, increasing performance and reducing time to market is particularly important to service providers,” says Weigel.
He adds that 3PAR's strategy is to drive utility computing in developing regions such as SA, which he says is an important market for the company. “3PAR has the ability to do well in tough markets. We are currently the only enterprise-level storage company to see growth and market share gain during this recession. Most of our competitors have all had 30% drops in storage revenue.”
According to Weigel, this is because companies are experiencing constrained budgets and are cutting down on IT spend. However, he notes that 3PAR is committed to continue investing in SA.
“The other pressure point for companies is managing traditional monolithic storage. Utility computing has the advantage of a low initial cost to acquire hardware. What VMWare has done for virtualisation, is what 3PAR is doing for storage.”
Power drain
In a Symantec white paper, research conducted by Glasshouse Technologies showed that on average, only 25% of an enterprise's allocated storage capacity was used by applications for written data. Operating resources are wasted on the housing, powering and cooling of disc drives that effectively go unused.
Chris Bamber, MD of SYSDBA, points to the recent Eskom tariff hike of 30% this year, and that it's been given the go-ahead to increase electricity tariffs again next year. He says this will hurt businesses financially if they don't consider ways to cut energy costs and improve efficiency.
Bamber adds that in some areas, it's no longer possible to supply companies with any more power and they will have to leverage the storage infrastructure that they already have.
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