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 Technology challenges
Technology is evolving at a rapid pace and IT managers must keep pace with developments. The challenge for them is to separate hype from reality, to identify which of these technologies can provide business value and fit into the enterprise strategy. They must then adapt their IT infrastructure so that new technologies can be rapidly deployed in future. Many are skeptical or confused about virtualization and cloud computing (see our Cover Story).
Even coping with existing technology is a challenge. Storage upgrades are not easy, especially in heterogeneous environments. There are challenges with consolidation too. Running a data warehouse and an OLTP application on the same storage, for instance, is a tricky proposition.
Sanjay Lulla of EMC said, “Some common challenges are designing, deploying, and managing backups. Most customers do not meet backup windows because of a very standard practice in India called Grandfather, Father, Son (a moniker for a traditional and redundant way of doing backups). Restore takes a lot of time and it is not easy. Designing, deploying, and managing in a virtualized environment is actually becoming very difficult. With virtualization we have to take careful calls in terms of how the system is to be designed.”
A L Jagannath, General Manager - Marketing, Sun Microsystems India, said, “As storage capacities have grown, traditional means of deploying and managing storage have also become outdated. Most of today’s storage systems require a highly trained administrator to effectively manage the environment. This adds time and cost to the deployment of new storage systems and increases the ongoing cost of managing the environment.”
In large enterprise networks it has become increasingly difficult to troubleshoot and fix storage performance issues. According to Sun’s Jagannath, the tools currently available offer limited visibility because they lack an end-to-end view that encompasses multiple layers from the CPU and application to the storage file system, operating system, and data services.
“Customers can no longer tolerate the high costs of proprietary storage or massive licensing fees and are looking for new ways to address their growing storage requirements and their challenges in managing storage environments,” said Jagannath.
“Today’s IT environments require storage solutions that can offer simplicity and ease-of-use, real-time diagnostics and tuning, massive scalability, and better storage economics,” he added.
In Conclusion
While data continues to be generated in the enterprise, there are technologies and strategies to manage data growth. It’s up to the CIO/IT manager to identify solutions and practices suited to the business. At the same time, costs can be controlled by doing things like data deduplication, consolidation, and good capacity planning. CIOs must dare to explore new technologies rather than emulating competitors. In doing so they will find another way to cut costs or improve capacity utilization. The vendor must take a closer look at the customer’s business and identify bottlenecks and ways to cut costs—then prescribe solutions.
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