Bangkok--21 Feb--Aziam Burson-Marsteller
As we move forward into 2011, HP believes that overcoming a number of important challenges will serve to drive the major storage trends for the remainder of the year. Successfully addressing these challenges will ultimately help companies around the world increase efficiency, productivity and agility. The storage trend drivers are, overcoming inflexible enterprise structures, breaking down siloed IT architectures, cutting through data sprawl, simplifying complex storage systems and adjusting storage infrastructures to meet client demands.
Overcoming Inflexible Enterprise Structures
In order to be successful in today’s environment enterprises must make IT, including storage systems, an integral part of their structure rather than simply being an administrative tool. This trend has been be highlighted in new research conducted on behalf of HP that found 76 percent (85% WW) of business and government executives indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service.
The increased adoption of mobile and cloud computing as led to greatly increased client expectations regarding the ability of business and government enterprises to respond instantly rather than in a matter of days or weeks. In recognition of this trend HP unveiled its vision for the Instant-On Enterprise in November 2010, which is an enterprise that embeds appropriate technology including storage, servers, networking and software into everything it does or delivers in order to best serve the stakeholders.
By embedding technology into everything it does, the Instant-On Enterprise helps organizations to deliver differentiated competitive advantage, serve stakeholders with whatever they want and need, instantly and be able to better address their rapidly changing needs.
Breaking Down Siloed IT Architectures
As a result of outdated, rigid and siloed architectures, many enterprises continue to face the challenge of having multiple IT silos. Project-based servers, single-application storage and systems siloed by lines of business are negatively impacting IT efficiency.
For enterprises in 2011 this challenge can be solved through the application of what HP is calling a converged infrastructure. By unifying storage, servers and network connectivity, these silos become interoperable resources and IT flexibility, agility as well as utilization are increased.
The HP Converged Infrastructure results is an IT infrastructure that delivers a new level of simplicity, integration, and automation that can accelerate crucial business outcomes including faster time to revenue through efficient system operations, flexibility to respond to business changes with simplified management, lower risks with reliable data backup and recovery.
Cutting Through Data Sprawl
With the alarming rate of data growth and the subsequent ‘data explosion’, enterprises are challenged with having to cost effectively store and manage data while still maintaining a high level of performance and reliability.
Increasingly, enterprises in 2011 will be focusing on data deduplication, which is crucial to maintaining control over data sprawl and the subsequent demands placed on storage capacity. By eliminating redundant versions of data, storage capacity is freed up allowing enterprises to store more of their data that is crucial and lower costs at the same time. In order to facilitate this trend HP has introduced HP StoreOnce data deduplication software that is specifically designed handle an enterprise’s deduplication tasks via a single, high performance architecture. The benefits of this software include simplifying management and improving data protection by providing the ability to centrally run multiple backup sites and easily replicate data from remote offices to data centers.
Simplifying Complex Storage Systems
Today’s enterprises are faced with storage that is increasingly complex, does not scale to meet their requirements and drains resources. For many organizations IT budgets are dedicated to managing these cumbersome, outdated storage infrastructures and this drives operational complexity over time.
To simplify their storage systems, leading enterprises are moving towards storage virtualization, which harnesses capabilities across the entire IT hardware infrastructure. This allows capacity to be quickly assigned or repurposed ‘on the fly’ to support a variety of critical business applications, allowing customers to respond and make changes in real-time.
To help enterprises take advantage of the benefits of virtualization, HP offers its P4000 solutions, which enable companies to optimize storage resources by increasing capacity utilization and delivering highly available storage for virtualized applications.
Adjusting Storage Infrastructures To Meet Client Demands
Storage needs to be flexible as well as reliable not only in terms of storing but also accessing data. Outdated storage infrastructures are inflexible, drain resources and are not cost-effective. Enterprises need to consider new approaches to storage that have proven successful in order to tackle these challenges and bring their storage requirements up to speed.
Cloud computing has become one of the most popular trends throughout 2010 and will continue to grow in 2011. In terms of storage, the cloud offers an efficient storage solution which also enables enterprises to eliminate the need for physical space to store data, thereby cutting costs. Cloud storage offers a great deal of flexibility with full access to shared data from any location and allows organizations to be agile as well as resilient.
To support enterprises that want to take advantage of cloud computing’s benefits regarding storage, HP offers HP 3PAR utility storage, which is a category of highly virtualized, dynamically tiered storage arrays built for public and private cloud computing. The 3PAR Utility Storage system is the only storage platform that delivers advanced features for cloud computing including multi-tenancy, automation and virtualization that are not available with traditional storage.
Currently, 3PAR helps over 6,000 enterprises run their applications more efficiently to dramatically accelerate the speed of the transition to private and public cloud computing, and the delivery of IT-as-a-Service.
HP Research: The Instant-On Enterprise,” Coleman Parkes Research Ltd., October, 2010.