Disaster recovery (DR) has been an ongoing theme in New Zealand since the first of the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Most recently, severe flooding in Thailand has globally affected procurement and pricing of HDDs, resulting in worldwide hard-disk shortage, as the country accounts for 40% of the world's HDD supply.
Vendors have been raising prices one after another for months, with HP being the latest to finally cave to the pressure, despite a long hold-out, on 1 February.
The disaster, and even the cost increase, has shown itself to be an opportunity for some organisations to revitalise their storage environment and rethink their DR preparedness plans, shaking up the outlook for 2012."As the storage industry continues to evolve, disruptive forces will have an increased impact on storage spending and represent increased opportunities.
In 2012, virtualisation, mobility, cloud infrastructure and services, Big Data, converged infrastructure, and appliances will disrupt traditional storage markets, spending, end-user demands, and purchasing patterns," IDC Research, program VP, storage Laura DuBois says.
The globalised supply chain for HDD is fragile, because vendors have tended to prioritise production costs over supply security. Gartner expects HDD costs to increase by five to 20% this year, in part because the Thailand floods have affected production of hard-disk drives and adjacent components the most.
The current environment poses a threat to the New Zealand CIO, who has until now maintained an efficient, ‘just in time' purchasing approach. For now, this approach "risks increasing capacity costs in the short-to-medium term, or putting IT environments under increasing stress as upgrade decisions are delayed in the hope of lower prices,” explains EMC NZ, chief technology officer, Arron Patterson.
Is SSD the answer?
Yes, say experts from IBM, EMC and HP, though the answer is far from unanimous, and none of these experts pinned the uptake of SSDs entirely on the floods."There is no evidence to support that claim,” says Hitachi Data Systems ANZ, chief technologist, Adrian De Luca.
"It has been well documented by analysts (IDC) who track the distribution of SSDs that they have been experiencing rapid growth (estimated at 51.5% CAGR between 2010 and 2015) due to the explosion of mobile devices and generally lower production costs.
De Luca is backed by Gartner, which states in its report, ‘Thai Floods Disrupt Global Semiconductor Automotive and Hardware Industries', that: "Despite considerable hype about near-term HDD constraints driving mass adoption of solid-state drives, only modest uptake of SSDs is likely because SSD pricing is still prohibitive for mass acceptance…
The SSD industry has created much hype over the idea of considerable SSD adoption in the near term… this [Thai floods] will not be a meaningful catalyst for SSD adoption.”However, the idea is still under considerable debate.
Other SSD incentives have been auto tiering capability, noted by HP and IBM, as well as an increasing trend towards self-tuning disk systems. Strengthened interest in SSD solutions has been noted by EMC in New Zealand:
"As SSD drive production has not been generally affected by the floods, we are seeing accelerating use of FAST VP to fully utilise SSD resources to enable lower drive count and, hence, lower cost solutions.
The majority of storage solutions shipped now include SSD and FAST VP technology,” says EMC NZ's Patterson.
Clearly defined continuity plans are mission critical for today's businesses
"Any organisation has to balance the savings made by keeping acquisition costs to a minimum versus having capacity available for a ‘rainy day'. Until recently, the thrust has been on minimising cost and ignoring the risk,” observes IBM ANZ, product manager – storage products, John Derrett.
"Storage trends for 2012While the flooding in Thailand has greatly impacted storage for the time being, it is not the only thing occupying the minds of those involved in the industry."
Cloud has been growing from strength to strength in the last two years,” says EMC's Patterson. "The increasing deployment of virtualisation, cloud and federation technologies continue to ensure that storage remains at the centre of business critical infrastructure.
Storage efficiency, says IBM's Derrett, is the number one trend for 2012: "Getting more with what is on the floor means using hot technologies like compression and storage virtualisation.”In fact, an increased interest in and demand for virtualisation and cloud-based storage is allowing CIOs to invest in new and trending storage technologies.
Phillip Martin, business unit manager storage for Hewlett-Packard New Zealand, recommends convergence of a virtualised infrastructure, storage, server and networking solutions to reap the full potential.
"A converged infrastructure eliminates costly and complex siloed IT environments by unifying individual stacks of storage, servers and networking into a single virtualised environment, enabling businesses to focus on innovation and driving growth.
Storage plays a critical role in the converged infrastructure by allowing businesses to virtualise data and create a unified Virtual Resource Pool that is instantly accessible for changing business needs,” Martin clarifies.HDS's De Luca agrees, listing cloud, convergence, energy efficiency and end-to-end virtualisation as the key trends emerging, as technologies mature and customers become ready to transform from old IT to new IT models.
2012 will likely see many changing predictions as things settle in Thailand, and possible new disasters come to the fore. The storage industry continues to evolve and grow with exciting speed, with Big Data, for example, set to continue to feed the industry's development.