One of the main problems facing storage technology and services providers today is an attitude that has been adopted by many CIOs. According to Logicalis US, a managed services provider (MSP) and international provider of IT solutions, budgetary constraints have forced many top technology decision makers into a "don't fix it unless it's broken" approach to storage.
Since storage is at the heart of IT, this presents a problem for business technology plans, according to Logicalis. Executive decisions to rely on storage solutions with an architecture developed two decades ago is not giving organizations the advanced data archival and retrieval capabilities that modern business demands, and this poses a major dilemma.
As CIOs' job functions begin to shift from managing specific systems and applications to delivering advanced technical services, the adoption of new storage solutions and innovations will become important. IT departments are also being charged with mining more value from information they manage as well as reducing data security risks. Legacy storage systems built on antiquated frameworks will no longer do the job, and new storage technologies optimized for a converged infrastructure are becoming a necessity.
“Our IT customers are telling us that they’re at a fork in the road," said Brandon Harris, vice president, HP Solutions, Logicalis US. "They’ve got issues with how their company is storing, accessing and mining its data, but their budgets haven’t grown in step in with their internal users’ IT expectations. They want to know if maintaining the status quo will be more costly than pursuing new storage innovations. The short answer is, yes.”
According to Logicalis, there are three main reasons decision makers are looking for storage innovations. The first is that they need to deliver their IT services seamlessly, in a timely and cost-effective manner. This requires establishing primary storage options that can support all applications and data types across physical virtual and cloud environments.
A second important reason for upgrading storage is to extract more value from big data. Storage solutions that offer information retention and analytics provide the ability to archive massive amounts of data and search through repositories within seconds, instead of the hours or days needed with more antiquated solutions.
Finally, reduction in risk exposure is a compelling reason to seek storage solution innovations. Disk-based storage with deduplication can offer protection as well as efficient and high-speed backup and recovery processes. Increased speeds for performing backup and recovery functions are also enabled through software-defined storage mechanisms that separate management and traffic functionality.
“No matter which vendor’s products a CIO employs in its storage solutions going forward, it’s critical that they choose wisely, ensuring that the devices they buy today are enabled for the converged and software-defined environments they will be running tomorrow,” added Harris.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
