IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Mon, 1st Nov 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Those who have seen the new movie ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ will be familiar with the opening scene where the lead character in the film, Gordon Gekko, is returned his possessions after being incarcerated for financial fraud and insider trading. Included in his belongings is one 80s era mobile phone – a Motorola DynaTAC (the size of a brick) which serves as a great metaphor of the phenomenal technological change we have experienced in the last 20 years.Data growth is inevitableA key challenge of every CIO is how to handle the ever-increasing levels of data that needs to be stored somewhere, safe and readily accessible. Even though storage budgets have remained fairly static over the last financial year, data is growing at around 30-50% annually. Across the Asia-Pacific region, Gartner notes it is an average closer to 60%, which of course carries with it associated costs.It’s not just at the enterprise end of the scale either. Small and medium sized businesses today operate in the many-terabytes-of-data category, and the need to store the information that keeps your business competitive in an efficient and agile way is more imperative than ever.But what does this mean for IT decision makers, and how can you get more for less? People often regard storage as a necessary evil rather than a competitive weapon, but this is a mistake. It’s not "just storage”. The right data storage strategy can have a massive effect on your company’s bottom line.Data storage generally represents the second highest spend in IT and as the data center becomes more heavily virtualised, the percentage on data spend also increases.Smart storage usage provides an opportunity to see real efficiencies, with technologies available that have allowed some businesses to reclaim over 80% of storage space. This sounds like a huge figure – and it is – but the right storage solution can make it a reality.In simple terms, it is about using less space, less power, and lowering operational costs – all while maintaining or even boosting performance, improving availability of information and simplifying management of the storage itself. Think of what you could achieve if you didn't need to buy as much storage or if your storage administrator could cut, by 75%, the amount of time they spend on managing your company’s data storage.Making the business caseWe find customers generally want to reduce cost, reduce risk or improve agility – in all cases solutions come to efficiency, flexibility and risk management.At one level, automation can help with operational efficiency. Unifying the storage environment, so that all tiers are on the same architecture, makes storage much easier to manage. And then there is storage efficiency.A truly efficient storage environment provides the ability to get the same job done with fewer disks whilst delivering higher capacity and performance, without sacrificing data availability. This is done by managing the growth of data.The application of storage efficiency techniques such as thin provisioning, deduplication, point based copies of data known as SIN clones, and snapshots of data clones can deliver substantial cost savings and will help run the IT side of your business far more effectively. Some enterprises have experienced using as much as 80% less space to store the same amount of data.They have cut the number of storage arrays and shelves in their data centers by 50-75%, reclaiming valuable real estate, and in some cases deferred data center expansion by years. Lower data space results in less cooling and heating – a benefit for the environment and the company’s bottom line.Owing to features like SIN clones, which can make instantaneous writeable copies of data, many companies have accelerated development and delivery of new products, services and applications and cut IT costs in half. Some have cut their annual capital expenditures and operating expenses by literally millions of dollars over three years.The right data storage strategy can have significant impact on your business efficiency and flexibility.