Storage industry trends among enterprises

SANpulse Technologies Inc. recently hosted a VIP Executive Briefing and Roundtable in Boston, Mass., to discuss storage industry trends with analysts, service providers, and practitioners. I talked with SANpulse CEO Peter Mehta about these trends and their end result. Here’s what Mehta and his colleagues have found:

• Data center consolidation continues to be a priority for many organizations as the result of acquisitions or the lack of power and space.
• Organizations are embracing virtualization at the server layer, but it’s just not happening at the storage layer. In fact, server virtualization is one of the top IT spending drivers for 2010, according to Bill Laliberte, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, who presented the findings of a recent ESG survey at the Roundtable.
• Enterprises like the concept of thin provisioning, says Mehta, but they aren’t using it for production applications. “Nobody wants to take the risk of running out of storage with production apps,” he says.
• Those companies that are using thin provisioning for production apps tend to have a charge back mechanism, but even that can create a point of contention because it must be decided if departments or other entities will be charged for what they actually use or what they’re allocated.
• Over allocation continues to be a problem. Even with the best storage technologies deployed, many enterprises still report storage utilization rates between 20 and 25% of their available storage resources, says Mehta.

According to Mehta, these trends point to the need for greater visibility into the IT and storage infrastructure. 

“Strategic IT design is now front and center,” he said. “A global view of the total IT environment, including virtualized platforms, storage and more, can help with resolving IT ownership and responsibilities, allowing enterprises to maximize the value of what they already own rather than relying on new capital projects to improve IT efficiency.”

– Crystal Bedell, Freelance Technology Writer and Content Developer