Solving Today’s Top Seven Storage Issues

August/September 2009 Sun Inner Circle ANZ Social Media: Maximize the Opportunity A Smarter Way to Manage Desktops This month's letter from Sun CIO Bob Worrall Share: Inner Circle Subscriber Center Get the content that meets your interests and needs. » Join now Print-friendly page Contact Sun

If you consider the server market years ago, servers were closed, proprietary and expensive. Then, open systems hit the market and challenged proprietary systems.

Today, fierce competition drives server vendors to rapidly innovate and deliver products at market-driven prices.

The same transition is now happening in storage. The rapid growth of digital data is driving business demand for innovation and architectures that are open, compatible with legacy systems, with higher performance and at a lower cost.

In order to gain an insight into the storage challenges faced, Sun commissioned independent research into what more than 300 ANZ businesses are struggling with today.

Data growth is driving storage challenges

The rapid rate of data growth was regarded as the number one storage issue followed by data management and cost concerns.

For most organisations, massive data growth is nothing new; however the results show that storage issues will only get worse as storage requirements rise. Alarmingly, one in six respondents does not know when storage capacity will run out.

A significant proportion of Australian organisations (40%) will run out of storage capacity in the next 12 months and the majority (55%) attributes this to exponential data growth rates.

In addition to the data growth issue that is affecting businesses, almost half of the respondents feel that their executive team does not have an adequate understanding of their company’s data storage needs.

Consequently, storage purchases are made without significant analysis and research into the opportunities to innovate, control operating costs such as power and cooling, and how to handle software licensing and optimise performance.

The survey found that many IT managers are looking to do more with their storage but are constrained by costs. A large proportion of respondents (44%) state that ongoing costs, such as software licensing and operating costs, have the most impact on storage purchasing decisions.

The next step for storage

As research has shown, data volume is increasing, IT budgets are shrinking, storage capacity is running out and operating costs are a great concern. On top of this, your executive team may not fully understand what is required.

By seeing storage as a tactical consideration, businesses will never be able to capture the value from their data growth.

How can storage be elevated to be a strategic consideration?

Business decision makers, from IT up to the executive team, need to invest time analysing current and future data storage requirements in order to innovate/extract value without blowing the budget or compromising on performance and availability of data.

In 2008, Sun globally launched Open Storage, a combination of industry-standard hardware and Open Source software, to enable companies to overcome these challenges in a cost-effective and efficient way.

The full research report highlights the storage challenges that business are facing, chronicles all the responses and reviews ways to solve today’s top seven storage issues.

If you want more information on topics covered in this issue of Inner Circle, please contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Goodlace
Managing Director
Sun Microsystems Australasia Pty. Ltd