With the growing challenges in storing data, enterprises across all verticals are looking seriously at alternative options, which are available to them. At the event, ‘IT Leadership Breakfast – Untangling The Storage Management Tangle’ organised by Sun Microsystems in collaboration with Biztech 2.0, industry leaders and experts discussed various storage related problems and possible options available in the market.

With the emergence of technologies such as virtualisation, enterprises will be able to overcome various problems concerning their storage environment. With the ever- increasing data, enterprises are adding a number of storage boxes to their IT infrastructure. The IT Leadership Breakfast roundtable was attended by Joe Heel of Sun Microsystems, Alok Kumar of Reliance Infosolutions, Nita Mahuvakar of Gammon India Limited, A. S. Arvind of B&K Securities, Pradip Lele of S. Kumars Nationwide Limited, C Praveen Kumar of Titan International, M. V. Sreeram of HPCL, Vinod Menon of Ashtech Infotech Pvt. Ltd., Manish Sethi of Datacraft and Shamik Baranwal of Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement.

"Compliance coupled with the growing number of users and data generations are the biggest drivers behind the growth of storage technologies. Though the need for storage is growing exponentially, the same is not happening with IT budgets. Changing business scenarios have compelled enterprises to frame their storage management policy to handle the storage related issues", said Joe Heel, senior vice president, Global Storage Practice, Sun Microsystems Inc.

The IT heads of respective enterprises raised various issues related to their storage environment and most of them were concerned about the fast changing storage technologies. Informed Alok Kumar, senior vice president, Reliance Infosolutions, "The requirement for storage is ever increasing and we have tested every storage option to its maximum capacity. The problem that lies with us is the optimisation of various storage devices that we have deployed." While Nita Mahuvakar of Gammon India Limited opined that her organisation is looking at a unified storage management.

While adding a number of storage boxes to the existing IT infrastructure is not only adding problems like managing and maintaining the IT departments, but also compelling the organisation to add extra people. Capacity utilisation is an important issue, as the effective utilisation of storage devices are quite low. There are three things the IT heads need to look into, while evaluating their storage environment. These are consolidation, virtualisation and current storage architecture of the concerned organisation. Said M V Sreeram, GM IT (Corporate), HPCL, "With the age of businesses getting into the competitive environment and technology changing so fast we need to do a lot of consolidations." The leaders also discussed about various alternative and cost effective storage solutions like tape, disks, SAN, IPSAN and iSCICI.

"The cost of deploying tape is one tenth of the disk and energy consumption is less in case of tapes. Storage solutions are now unbundled and open source systems will become the best alternative option before the enterprises in the coming days ", concluded Joel.