In the next three years, companies are expected to deal with exabytes of data, or millions of terabytes of data, so the traditional monolithic storage model may no longer be effective in handling such a vast amount of data. Companies may want to adopt service-oriented storage, Izwan Ismail writes.

Yoshida

MANAGING storage for millions of terabytes of data will be the challenge facing companies in the next few years. Traditionally, most companies will opt to add more storage capacity, but this is not going to make business sense since adding storage boxes will increase power usage in the data centre and may create more underutilised storage boxes.

As it is, companies are already faced with severe underutilised storage where only 20 to 30 per cent of storage capacity is used per storage box, said Hitachi Data Systems’ chief technology officer Hu Yoshida.

Besides that, companies are facing problems connecting IT with the business.

“IT managers should focus on aligning IT with the business roadmap while dealing with constrained resources, and in many cases, managing storage is the biggest challenge,” Yoshida said.

That’s why Hitachi has introduced the service-oriented storage approach, which advocates that storage planning should centre on the needs of users.

“The approach is not about selling more storage but instead, enabling companies to leverage on a single service-oriented storage for delivering storage services,” Yoshida said, adding that the new approach will help companies do away with the current piecemeal, task-oriented approach that often leads to redundancy and oversubscription of storage resources.

Service-oriented storage takes advantage of virtualisation technology, which enables storage to be provisioned and managed according to business needs.

This virtualisation capability is based on an architecture that goes beyond volume pooling to provide a rich set of common services for application servers on the front-end and a heterogeneous storage system on the back-end.

“This will enable storage services to be presented as a unified whole, across block, file and object data,” Yoshida said.

Prospects

On the level of technology adoption by Malaysian companies, Yoshida said many of them are still in the early stage, but it shouldn’t take long before they start adopting such technology as service-oriented storage.

Hitachi remains bullish about its storage products business, especially with the availability of the service-oriented architecture. Managing director Johnson Khoo said the company is looking at

100 per cent growth for the next eight quarters, with market share going up from the current four per cent to 10 per cent.

“The government sector will still be our biggest customer, followed by financials, insurance and the multinational market,” he added.

Even though service-oriented storage would mean that Hitachi would be pushing more service-oriented type of products than storage boxes, the company is confident that this strategy will increase its product value to customers.