Most business people are, or should be, aware of Parkinson’s Law, which states: ‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.’ There is a similar law which is demonstrated daily in IT:’ Data expands to fill the available storage.’
Everyone knows the problem. Data is simply multiplying. In business, the major research firms are in consensus that the average is about 50 per cent every year for all business enterprises internationally. That is exponential, so the result is a doubling every 18 months or so.
As it happens, the data storage capacity of those spinning magnetic disks we depend on so much is also growing at much the same rate as the engineers succeed in cramming more bits and bytes on the platters and rotating those disks even faster.
The theme of matching technology performance to real business needs at an economical capex was taken up by Justin Connolly, IBM storage brand manager.
“We talk about business needing to be agile and dynamic to survive and compete, but that needs to be matched by its IT systems,” he said.” In data storage, virtualisation, ILM and hardware tiering are all aimed at cutting costs while retaining performance levels.
“Every single business today plans to be successful and respond as the economy improves. With the continuing objectives of costs down and performance up, investment in the next generation of systems will be part of that.” According to Connolly, IBM’s solution was the new XIV series for enterprise data storage.” We are promising Tier 1 performance and functionality from Tier 3 hardware and cost levels.”
In the market, that means an entry level of €170,000 to €200,000 for 20TB to 27TB of high performance storage.
Connolly spoke of adding more intelligence in the storage stack.” The storage cluster is automated in its own right and offering smarter control of ILM and replication, for example, more closely and dynamically matching specific applications. All of this contributes to lowering the costs of managing storage, which cannot be entirely automated. Once that really was a black box magic art in the IT world. Now it can be as simple and intuitive as using an iPhone. Define the business needs and policies and all of the smart stuff will follow through in the background,” he said.
Full Article:
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