In today’s technology driven environment, business agility has become intricately intertwined with IT’s ability to be agile.
In many organizations, the value of technology has become trapped because of traditional IT structures that are no longer sufficient for the reality of business today. The result of this is that businesses are still spending 70 per cent to 80 per cent of their annual IT budgets just keeping the lights on.
Storage is no different. The traditional silo approach to data management has resulted in a number of different issues that all impact the overall ability of IT to respond to changes.
What we’ve found is that there are nine pain points almost every enterprise in Dubai and across the UAE experiences when it comes to traditional storage structures.
Under-utilized and over provisioning of storage
One of the biggest problems with the traditional approach to storage is that different silos can’t share storage. As such, it’s necessary to guess how much storage each silo would need.
Almost inevitably, this approach led to many silos having too much storage provisioned. This under-utilized storage not only incurs a capital cost, but also from an operation perspective, there are increased expenses associated with power and cooling.
For companies in the UAE and Dubai, EMC and NetApp provide a number of solutions that are designed to combat this.
Storage waste
Because it is necessary to guess how much data each silo would require at the time of purchase, large amounts of it inevitably becomes wasted.
This is a common story for many firms throughout Dubai and the UAE. EMC VNX and EMC Isilon for example are both idea for ensuring that you can manage more data, while doing it more efficiently and keeping your information available and secure.
Inefficient data recovery mechanisms
Think about what would happen if you lost access to your data. You might have it backed up on tape, but how much of a headache is it going to be to find the right tape, and restore the relevant data.
In the UAE, EMC for example has built a name for itself providing efficient and simple data recovery mechanisms into its storage platforms. This is just one example of how moving to a consolidated storage platform, such as Go Storage, can help your business to avoid such issues.
Limited or no disaster recovery for some systems
The silo nature of many storage platforms means it is difficult for businesses in the UAE to ensure all their data is protected.
But by combining EMC's recovery management offerings, backup technology, and management strategies you can fortify your information and assure compliance.
Inefficient power utilization
More hard drives means more power consumption. By leveraging consolidated storage, it’s possible to reduce the amount of storage infrastructure required. It is also possible to leverage much larger drives than would be efficient in a silo-style environment because of the ability to share capacity amongst different business functions.
High OPEX and continual CAPEX required
Because of the way that silo storage is structured – i.e. spare storage can’t be shared between silos – it is naturally a very wasteful approach to data management. It wasn’t such a problem five years ago when the amount of data a company stored in its datacentre was small, but today, it’s a recipe for preventing business agility.
With a consolidated storage infrastructure, it is possible to leverage automation to take costs out of IT, deliver IT as a true service, and accelerate the journey from physical IT to virtual IT to the cloud.
All of these approaches can help firms in the UAE reduce storage related CAPEX and OPEX.
Various points of management with poor visibility ahead of time
One of the biggest issues with silo-style storage is it is difficult to get a clear oversight of the storage situation across the business. This is one of the main reasons businesses that haven’t moved to consolidated storage suffer from oversupply and under utilization of storage.
Luckily for businesses in Dubai and the UAE, EMC and NetApp both have a number of solutions that can help improve information governance actionable with archiving, file intelligence, eDiscovery, and records management solutions.
Inelastic and slow to respond to business requirements
A clear overview of the entire storage environment – as well as the ability to add more storage on the fly – means that maintaining a silo-style infrastructure just doesn’t make sense.
