Dell feels that storage optimisation will be a major trend in enterprise storage environments this year. “What we are looking at is to create cost-effective archiving solutions to better manage record retention, as well as assist in migrating lower-tier storage to lower-cost platforms, which can dramatically cut total storage costs,” says Phillip A. Davis, Vice President, Solutions, APAC and Japan, Large Enterprise Business Unit, Dell. “In addition, enterprises should also look at data deduplication to save storage costs,” he feels.

Consolidation of storage will result in fewer licenses to manage, better utilisation of each device and operational expenditure savings. For this enterprises can look at tiered storage. Disaster recovery and compliance are other key areas that will continue to see adoption.

The RoI on storage consolidation using our solutions could be around 30 percent with greater effciency and utilisation of storage.

“There is still a lot of confusion around cloud offerings and we do not think that enterprises would be ready for adoption this year. What we do see happening is the formation of a strategy in the next six to nine months to determine which pieces of the infrastructure they want to migrate on to the cloud,” feels Davis.

A few years ago, enterprises preferred having their storage on Fibre Channel, because it gave higher performance and was robust too. Today, more money is spent on Ethernet and IP as compared to Fibre Channel. It has more recently moved on to 8 GB but there is no roadmap beyond 16 GB Fibre Channel and they have proved expensive.

“Dell already has the 10 GB Ethernet in the market and 40 GB is well defned. They are easier to deploy, manage and virtualise as compared to Fibre Channel that increases complexity,” says Davis.

IDC on Dell
Dell has built a full line of storage relate services and tools that address enterprise needs. Through a combination of in-house expertise and strategic partnerships, Dell is in a position to address customer needs for storage solutions that go beyond technology and ultimately provide ROI matching with the customer's original investment.

ashwani.mishra@9dot9.in