Bangkok--8 Feb--Core & Peak The priorities and IT needs of companies have been evolving and CIOs need to be able to cope with the changing demands of the business. Shrinking budgets coupled with rising costs and increasing data storage needs have caused IT projects, expenditures, priorities and leadership to be called into question. CIOs have to be able to manage these new demands and expectations. In addition to these business needs, the world is moving in the direction of green IT and companies are seeing the need to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions to cut down on operational costs. Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems cautions CIOs about the challenges they are likely to face in 2008 and how they can address it. They include external issues like economic uncertainly, as well as internal ones like addressing data growth needs. 1. Control carbon emissions resulting from the generation of electricity: With increasing concern about global warming, we will see more governments impose guidelines and legislation around carbon emissions. Major corporations will set targets for reduction of carbon emissions. A major source of carbon emissions comes from the generation of electricity. The increasing demand for compute power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity will increase the need for data centre power and cooling. IT will have to look at ways to organise their data centre infrastructure to minimise energy consumption. 2. Have proper data backup plans and disaster recovery strategies in place: The collapse of the housing market in the US, high oil prices and the falling dollar will create economic uncertainty and as a result, CIOs will face shrinking budgets. IT will be pressured to do more with less. Doing more with less will drive IT to consider ways to consolidate IT resources through virtualization, increase utilisation of resources such as server cycles and storage capacities, eliminate redundancies where ever possible through de-duplication and single instance store, and reduce the working set of production data through the aggressive use of archive products. 3. Do more to address data growth: Structured data like databases are exploding as they are required to hold more data, longer, for compliance reasons. Semi structured data, like email, web pages, and document management data are increasing dramatically. Pressures will drive the need to archive data in order to reduce the working set of production data. This will call for new types of archiving systems that can scale to petabytes and provide the ability to search for content across different modalities of data. 4. Ensure efficient storage of data: With the growing awareness that the storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilisation and too many redundant copies, buying more of the same old storage architectures will no longer be an option. A new architecture that can scale performance, connectivity, and capacity, non-disruptively to multiple petabytes is required. It must also be able to provide new data and storage services like multi-protocol ingestion and common search, across heterogeneous storage arrays with centralised management and secure protection. 5. Ensure continuous data and application availability: With the need for continuous application availability, IT will need the ability to move data without disruption to the application. While software data movers have been found to be too disruptive. The movement of data will have to be offloaded to a storage system which can move data over high speed Fibre Channel links without the need for the application’s processor cycles. This will be increasingly more important for migration of data during storage upgrades to larger and larger storage capacity frames. The role of the CIO is changing with the times and so are the challenges that they are facing. Beyond influencing the technological direction of a company, CIOs have also started to play a part in pushing the business forward. The good news is that there are more and more technologies available in the market that can help CIOs cope with new demands. New technologies such as control unit virtualization of storage, data de-duplication, thin provisioning and services oriented storage have all come in to help CIOs cope with issues of cost, management and resource allocation within their technological infrastructure. Moving into 2008, it will be the responsibility of the CIO to balance the IT needs of a company with its business needs and to walk the fine line between the two to ensure that neither is compromised in the advancement of the other. Srisuput Siangyen PR Manager Core & Peak Co., Ltd. Tel: +(66) 2-439-4600 ext. 8300 Mobile: +(66) 81-694-7807 Email: [email protected]