The KSS principle: Keep storage simple

Although these trends are important, there are just two points for storage professionals, chief information officers and business executives to bear in mind: the accelerating growth of data to be stored, currently averaging 50 per cent per year, and the limited storage budget increases for IT departments, currently averaging in the low single-digits. 

It’s the classic case of having to do more with less.

According to a Forrester Consulting study conducted on behalf of Dell, the vast majority of IT organisations are seeking storage that is simpler to manage and uses automation to free up staff members for more-strategic tasks. 

The survey of 839 IT professionals showed that 74 per cent of IT leaders and 66 per cent of storage administrators believe that storing and managing data is too complex today.

The key findings revealed that storage is generally complex, hard to manage and expensive. Provisioning times, cost-effectiveness, accuracy of provisioning and responsiveness to business needs are the top four concerns. For these reasons, storage vendors are placing a greater focus on automation and easier-to-manage storage environments to not only reduce storage complexity, but reduce costs as well. 

According to the Forrester study, organisations see value in buying storage, other data-centre technologies and services from one vendor. A total of 95 per cent of IT leaders and storage admins indicated that they see value in buying storage from the same vendor from which they buy server, networking, system-management or IT services. 

Respondents indicated that a deeper relationship with a smaller number of vendors can build trust, provide technology synergies that ease management and streamline support relationships, making it easier to manage the big picture.

This brings us to the final major storage trend – convergence – which actually comes full circle, with automation and simplicity. 

A critical component of IT convergence is the desire to simplify operations and amplify IT productivity. Gartner predicts that 30 per cent of data centres will be converged within the next two to three years.

The driving force behind converged infrastructures is the opportunity to increase efficiency and agility in operations, applications and service management. Benefits include reduced cost of running applications, faster infrastructure deployments, simplicity and speed of management, and improved time-to-value for application and cloud deployments.

 

Trying innovative solutions

Although Forrester reported that quantification of the precise total cost of purchasing and managing storage remains limited, interest has grown in managing soft costs such as organisational agility, application performance and business continuity, in addition to upfront acquisition costs. 

Respondents indicated a willingness to try new solutions, including software features, licensing models and innovative vendors, if they can deliver better long-term results, and they see innovative storage-management approaches as a way to improve the bottom line.

These aren’t the only trends – or considerations – that will affect your storage environments and plans, but we believe they are the key drivers and should keep you busy for the foreseeable future. 

But, whatever you do, don’t forget about KSS: keeping storage simple? really does make (dollars and) sense.

 

Ekaraj Panjavinin is country manager of Dell Corp (Thailand).