ILM

Storage for better business

Avijit Basu - Country Manager, Network Storage Solutions, HP India, talks to Soutiman Das Gupta about how the enterprise can use storage strategies in order to carry out business more effectively.

What are some of the major challenges faced by CIOs when it comes to managing storage infrastructure environments?

As the data volumes expand at a phenomenal rate, CIOs are constantly faced with the challenge of balancing data accessibility, data growth, and managing costs.

They have to ensure accessibility of the right information at the right time, while keeping the management process simple and cost-effective. All these, coupled with the task of choosing the right mix of technology and also increasing government regulations on data retention make it a complex challenge.

How will ILM help companies carry out business more effectively?

Information Life Cycle Management is the active management of data— from creation to deletion—based on changing application and business relevance. By being able to effectively place, migrate, protect, archive, and remove data based on your business policies or regulations with little to no human intervention ILM enables busi-nesses to become more agile and adaptive to change, derive a better return on IT and ensure compliance to data retention regulations

What strategy advice do you have for CIOs of companies that have seen that their storage infrastructures have not given them the expected business benefits?

In a business scenario that is characterized by explosive growth of data and ongoing changes in the economic environment, it is advisable to develop infrastructure that allows you build an adaptive enterprise. This will help develop an infrastructure that is modular, scalable and grows seamlessly with your business needs.

The adaptive enterprise can be a virtualized, standards-based architecture that will extend the current network's storage capabilities to higher levels while keeping the management aspect simple since it can deploy standard, modular building blocks powered by intelligent software.

In the face of the changing needs of businesses in India and APAC, how will storage solution offerings evolve in the next year?

The key drivers for growth in the region are increased business activity resulting in huge data volumes, increased use of data for competitive advantage, enhanced sensitivity to data protection and disaster recovery, and stricter government regulations on data retention.

The movement from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to network storage is expected to continue as we move forward. Companies in the banking & financial services and telecom verticals continue to be the key storage drivers while other areas would include manufacturing, education, BPO, and governance. We will see increased adoption of modular, scalable, and pay-as-you-grow storage infrastructure.

Soutiman Das Gupta can be reached at soutimand@networkmagazineindia.com