Enterprises have spent a lot of money on storage systems. However, the storage effciency in data centres for most of the enterprises has been as low as 30 to 35 percent. So increasing storage effciency will be high on the priority for CIOs this year,  feels Surajit Sen, Director, Channels, Marketing and Alliances, NetApp India.

Thin provisioning and data deduplication can be considered as some of the other key solutions to increase storage utilisation and reduce costs.

Storage virtualisation is another area that enterprises will look at this year. “We have seen massive deployments of server virtualisation. Desktop virtualisation is gaining momentum. However, enterprises should realise that to achieve the larger objective of virtualisation, they have to virtualise their storage environment as well,” feels Sen.

The advent of cloud computing has brought big changes to storage strategies, with customers craving pricing models that align with usage and systems that can manage ever-increasing data volumes. Moving forward, this model will be crucial in the evolution of enterprise data centres. Enterprises should look at service providers that are uniquely positioned to deliver solutions to suit to enterprise architectural or operational decisions.

GigaOM on NetApp: NetApp is making a big push as a provider of storage infrastructure for cloud service providers. The company has been a leader in the growing data deduplication space, but that status when jeopardized when EMC stole Data Domain from NetApp’s grasp.

ashwani.mishra@9dot9.in