StorEdge 2004

CIOs learn about flexible storage strategies at StorEdge 2004

Balint Fleischer

CIOs in India got a unique opportunity to gather insights from industry veterans and peers at StorEdge 2004. The event, jointly organised by Network Magazine and Sun Microsystems, was a two-city forum, which brought together the nation's leading IT strategists and decision-makers to discuss newer, more cost-effective ways to leverage data storage. Held in New Delhi on April 05, 2004 and Mumbai on April 06, 2004, the events saw enthusiastic CIOs and IT Managers attend in very large numbers.

Data in our hands

Participants at New Delhi raise a technical query for the speaker

The World Wide Web contains 92,000 TBs of data including surface Web and deep Web. If one were to add to this 400,000 TB of new information generated by e-mail every year and 274 TB of messages generated through instant messaging, the figures are mind numbing.

Within a few years, the storage systems that are currently deployed by most corporates would soon be incapable of handling this growing load. Corporates are today looking at a system that would enable them to deploy information wherever they need it, whenever they need it, and in whichever format they need it. The event offered the IT personnel strategies to help solve these issues.

Speakers

Speaking at the event, Balint Fleischer, VP—Network Storage and Chief Technologist, Sun Microsystems, said that of late, there has been a rapid growth of fixed content data. And this growth has been felt especially in the areas of images, rich media, medical records, legal documents, financial documents. In fact, according to him, 75 percent of all new digital content is fixed content.

Val Souza, Editor, Express Computer said that print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about five Exabytes of new information in 2002.

This would mean that there is about 800 MB of recorded information produced for each person on earth, each year.

92 percent of the new media was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. Information on film accounted for 7 percent and the rest on paper and other optical media.

Growth drivers

Factors driving growth for enterprise storage include regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, Basel II, and RBI and SEBI Guidelines. Enterprise applications like ERP and CRM have also been driving growth in a big way.

Such levels of growth call for systems that are adaptable to different kinds of applications. Most enterprises today require a storage architecture that will enable them to address the various compliance requirements, repository requirements, etc with the same system. Having a fixed architecture doesn't give enterprises that flexibility. The storage system should be able to adapt to a specific industry.

Next generation

The next generation storage system would have to scale up to handle Petabytes of information. The system should have the ability to search and retrieve information based on both the content as well its attributes. The system would also call for quicker query response time and allow proactive methods of management.

According to Fleischer, as part of the network computer architecture, Sun is developing a series of technologies, products and solutions to address these emerging trends. But the key would be to meet all these needs, and at the same time lower administrative costs.