Day 2/ Session

Data Consolidation & Management

Enterprise efficiency should be the top most agenda for any CIO, opined Suresh Menon, Head-Storage and Solutions Business, Dell India

Menon argued that this meant that to create an efficient datacenter, you had to have efficient data management and efficient clients.

The greatest challenge facing the CIO today, as Menon observed is that of pressure on OPEX with increased data management challenges, disaggregation with increasing cost and complexity. “With data witnessing a 10x growth between 2006-2011, three million times the information in all the books ever written, about 9.6 hours spent on looking for their data, IT departments spending between 20-30% on their manpower dealing with tape backup problems, the data centre challenges for the CIO is bound to increase,” said Menon.

However, Menon has a way to counter this and recommended that the CIOs need to deploy solutions around virtualization, flex computing, SaaS, green/energy, security, dynamic front-end infrastructure, static back-end configuration and cloud “It is observed that SAN 1.0 and virtualization drives efficiency in a simplified networked storage, enhances consolidation RoI, while enabling simple virtualized storage architecture,” averred Menon.

However using this technology Menon clearly advocated two major RoI benefits such as SAN RoI through storage consolidation and server consolidation through virtualization which will $60 million OPEX and CAPEX through 2010. Menon called upon the CIOs to keep a watch on the new generation storage requirement which would be flexible and highly available, having a cloud storage scale-out approach ensuring capacity virtualization, greater RoI/TCO business platform etc.

Unified single network fabric is also the need of the hour for advancing network needs and control. Virtual storage being the trend, Menon advised the CIOs to leverage Dell-EqualLogic product solutions for IP SAN in a virtualized environment for better data lifecycle management as a strategy to align IT Infrastructure with the business based on the changing value of information over time.

Menon pointed archival solutions to be driving better RoI where inactive data or 5tb can move to lower cost, ATA-based disk storage as $0.01 per MB, reclaim 5 TB of primary storage cost savings at $0.4 per MB, while reducing backup time by 50%.

He insisted upon having efficient clients for productivity, efficient datacenter for scalability and efficient cloud for flexibility. “This is possible by way of having green and virtualized solutions, work towards intelligent planning and procurement strategy, zero-touch infrastructure deployment, on-demand self-service experience, integrating internal and external cloud with seamless virtual platform integration strategy.

— N Geetha