Articles
Storage predictions for 2011
Company storage solutions are a hot topic of discussion for the majority of SME and enterprise organisations. Industry analysts, Forrester report that storage capacity requirements are growing 20% to 40% each year, influenced by escalating regulations and recordkeeping requirements. It seems that 2011 will be no different as an increasing number of companies begin to consider their options, their key concerns gravitate towards the varying importance and challenges that virtualisation, data deduplication and cloud computing will propose. With this in mind, we have explored the key topics and what affect they will have on both markets.
The developments and emphasis on virtualisation is likely to increase in 2011. We will see an increase in consolidation as companies continue to virtualise their infrastructures. However, both SME and enterprise organisations will have to be cautious in their approach and adopt virtualisation in accordance to their individual capabilities and requirements. Larger enterprises will focus on the cost benefits of virtualisation and their ability to consolidate. Whereas, SMEs lack the infrastructure or general need to consolidate, gaining little financially from reducing their few servers.
For larger enterprises in particular, deduplication will continue to be another major concern as industry analysts Gartner estimates that 85% of their data is unstructured. Intrinsically, with more employees, enterprises are far more likely to store unnecessary information and duplicate data across hundreds of computers, potentially having a negative impact financially. For smaller companies it is simply not a cost effective option and remains a lower priority for them due to reduced data demands.
Despite the continued buzz surrounding the cloud, we still lack a clear and concise definition. In one respect, the cloud could be identified as ‘utility computing’ – similar to needing more electricity or water – when resources are low, flip a switch or turn on a tap. Importantly, the conversation needs to step away from where the cloud is and focus on when we can use it. Businesses need to be assured that data is accessible wherever and whenever. Salesforce for instance, primarily functions as a website; however, it acts as a hosted application dynamically allocating or increasing user’s virtual storage when more space or more capacity is required. This seamless approach is necessary, as customers should not have to worry about the underlying provision, but remain aware and accept that they will be charged for this functionality.
Many of the emerging challenges in 2011 will have a similar affect on both SME’s and enterprises. Data growth will be the greatest challenge for the full spectrum of companies. It is becoming more habitual and natural for people to store everything they do virtually – every email, document and image – with a blissful expectation that there is no limit. Gartner predicts an 800% data growth by 2015, highlighting the significant data explosion. In response, scale-out computing has become a continuing solution for expanding businesses attempting to acclimatise to this issue. The health sector exemplifies this increasing problem area with recent concerns surrounding patient records and the rise in regulation and medical legislation, insisting records are stored virtually for 30 years or more.
As businesses approach methods of managing its virtual environments, SME and enterprise organisations will encounter a variety of different challenges to one another. SMEs naturally do not have the same resources available as their larger equivalents, and as a result, are becoming IT generalists that do not have the subject-matter experts to cover networking, system management etc. This subsequently places pressure on the designated IT individual who must be able to understand this highly complex environment. Although many companies are aware of the challenges they face with rapid data growth, the data explosion needs to be managed cautiously and additional costs will need deliberation to account for the lack of skill set.
Businesses will need to consider a variety of issues when approaching storage solutions in 2011. Gartner and Forrester highlight both the topical and major issues that many will face this year. SMEs will arguably feel less of the impact as their size will allow for more efficient storage implementation whereas enterprise will see the greatest financial benefits, though the key will be through caution and planning. Universally, virtualisation will highlight the major obstacle for any company looking to expand, as a multitude of factors will need consideration. The buzz-term ‘cloud computing’ is the most illustrious and hardest issue to predict, as a developing concept, its position within the business will become more apparent and begin to show its true potential for both SME and enterprise organisations in 2011.
By Jason Collier, CTO and Co-Founder of Scale Computing
- Posted on: 10th February 2011 at 12:00am
- Topics: Consolidation; Convergence;
