According to a Buyer’s Guide on Storage and Backup from Computer Weekly , Storage represents at least 15% of the total IT budget in the year 2011. Wrong assessments of your storage needs, uninformed choices on storage solutions could prove to be expensive.
Storage for most businesses, until it begins to matter, is an afterthought. It shouldn't be. Storage, especially when data management is critical for a business, should be aligned with strategic goals, effective expense management, and plenty of compliance and security considerations as need be. Here are some tips to get your choices of storage solutions sorted out:
Storage isn’t Isolated
If your business storage considerations usually lead you to believe or practice a “silo” practice such as to have a distinct server, storage, and network team, and different budgets for storage, then it’s time to change. Converge these silos; align storage considerations with that of your business strategy. Use virtual server technology, for instance, for hosting applications. Streamline workflows and teams around workload stacks, and optimize business support.
Watch out for the "Catching up" Effect
RIM wasn't threatened by the iPhone when it first launched. Eventually, however, iPhone dominated the smartphone scene effectively catapulting RIM out of the arena. Modern storage solutions will do that to the traditional methods such as tape and hard drives. The cloud wont' disrupt now, but the world will wake up to latch on to the cloud. As Steve Wozniak puts it,
"New disruptive technologies don't have an instant disruptive effect"
In an article on computing.co.uk, David Flynn -- CEO of Fusion-IO, states:
"SAN [storage area network] storage will be used for archival purposes," said Flynn. "Disk is the new tape. Primary storage will be Flash within servers."
Technology will catch-up. Businesses that don't run with get left behind.
Custom Data Storage
Today, it’s just a hierarchical form of data storage. If a stack of data is important, for example, it finds the top-tier block storage, and the other data occupies the other tiers. This tiered approach has been around for a while. As data volumes mount and businesses begin to deal with big data, the need of the hour is specific workload definitions, and optimized storage of data. Optimized architecture makes more sense today than generic solutions, for instance.
The Cloud hovers on the horizon
The years 2010 through 2011 have been the years of the cloud where the entire business and technology world’s attention has been on Cloud Computing. As we noted in our previous post on Cloud Backup, not as many businesses jump aboard the cloud bus as yet. There’s possibility of slow adoption thanks to the availability of enterprise-grade cloud storage options, better service level agreements (SLA).
While the cloud isn’t going to endanger the data center just yet, it’s certainly a direction businesses would like to move in.
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