It is a no-brainer when we say that there is information overload in the world. But, have you ever imagined, by how much? There was 5.2 million Terabytes of data generated in the world till the year 2003. By the year 2008 we were already creating 511 million Terabytes of data every year. And, in 2009 we created 1 Zetabyte or 1 billion Terabytes of data.

This information overload is being fuelled by consumers and enterprises alike. Be it Facebook that hosts more than 40 billion photos to Walmart that carries out more than a million customer transactions every hour. Technology leaders are working on providing solutions for this data explosion through various means – with one of the important ones being Unifed Storage Architectures.

CTO Forum tied up with NetApp to host a series of events on the said topic in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Focussed at IT managers the events had CIOs from leading companies in these cities discussing on this topic.

The subject sparked engaging conversations between the CIOs themselves, the editors and panelists from Netapp. The discussions spanned across topics including migration, virtualisation, unstructured data and more.

While talking about the challenges that an organisation faces in the current environment, Syed Ahemed  Infrastructure Head, ING Vysya, said, “ The three areas where we face challenges are in the area of availability, performance and security. Any of these cannot be compromised whether it is a bank or any other institution. To be able to say that the data is available 24x7, you are looking at classifying data, being able to manage and then recover. While the need is increasing for innovations in
managing data, it is also important to secure the ever increasing data store. But when you come to security there is always a trade-off between the amount of security and the level of performance that architecture can deliver.”

Answering to a question on migration being a challenge for organisations Ravinder Vaswan, Head IT operations, TI, said, “If you talk from the migration perspective it is a bigger challenge because we do not have any standard tools. If you talk about movement in heterogeneous environments, no vendor gives you a specifc migration tool that can help you move this data.”

Replying to the queries Syed Masroor from NetApp said, “When you are migrating data you are bringing in newer applications and newer services too. So, the challenge exists at various levels – application, connectivity, user experience and storage. So its possible to do a migration which is a lot less painful, it involves using the right services. There is defnitely a cost to that, but the cost has benefts.”

The Delhi event started off with a question on the panel’s view on the future of storage architectures. Parvinder Singh, VP & Head - IT  Max New York Life, said, “Taking the long term into consideration storage architectures should be able to give you a consolidated view of things.”

Continuing to answer the question, Mr. Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda Motors said, “The problem is not really in the structured part of the data, that is taken care of; but the major challenge comes from how do you take care of your unstructured data. Right now, we have to manage the SAN, NAS and DAS separately; I should have a single console from where I should be able to manage all these things.”