Kathy Gibson reports from IDC Cloud and Data Centre Roadshow in Rosebank – Storage has become the new hot topic in ICT, largely as a result of the increase in virtualisation.
Dennis Naidoo, senior systems engineer at Tintri, says the increase in cloud investment is also driving the trend.
Meanwhile, the introduction of flash storage is giving companies more efficient and scalable resources.
“ICT is under pressure,” he says. “It needs to know it all, do it fast and do it like cloud, with the same level of elasticity and agility.”
And they are expected to do this with shrinking budgets, Naidoo adds.
Some customers are still running a purely physical infrastructure – and they cannot get to the cloud environment with these infrastructures. Naidoo points out that the journey to cloud must include virtualisation.
Virtualisation is disrupting the storage market, he adds, allowing resources to be shared – but it comes at the cost of increased complexity and costs.
In the cloud, these challenges become worse, and a lack of adequate skills is also encountered.
The Tintri storage solution is built as a virtualised system that can help to improve the availability and performance of apps, Naidoo says.
He cites the example of a Fortune 1 000 customer with 50 000 virtual machines, 2,6 petabytes of storage, and 75 data stores in eight data centres. With a 99,999% uptime, this company spends just four hours a week managing its storage.
To make the journey to virtualised storage, Naidoo recommends that CIOs consider a system that is hypervisor agnostic, appropriately packaged, provides realtime and predictive analytics, unrestricted calling, balanced performance and cost, and is integrated into the existing ecosystem.