From left: Allan Swann (ARN), Allan King (Infront Systems), James Sillence (EMC), Andrew Thomas (Thomas Duryea), Stefan Gillard (Engineroom.io), Rodney Gedda (Telsyte),
Anthony Davis (Nexenta), Jennifer O’Brien (ARN), Richard Denyer (Fusion Systems), Matthew Swinbourne (NetApp), Phil Lancaster (Bluechip Infotech)
STORAGE CONTINUITY AND OPPORTUNITY
Telsyte senior analyst, Rodney Gedda, said hybrid Cloud is a top trend to affect the storage arena. In a Telsyte Australian Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Market Study, storage rated the top workable area of the infrastructure (61 per cent) to develop a hybrid Cloud. It was followed by servers (40 per cent); applications (37 per cent); and disaster recovery (31 per cent).
“Storage is one area where customers can integrate more easily then perhaps an application or a full disaster recovery [DR] environment so that’s why businesses think that’s the most workable area,” Gedda said.
Touching on the evolution of storage, he said tomorrow’s reseller should: balance project and managed services [annuity revenue]; focus on multiple delivery models [hybrid Cloud]; skill up for software-defined future; add value to equipment and as-a-service (for example, disaster recovery); and provide business outcomes. Gedda said a company’s Cloud journey typically involves a hybrid model.
“Cloud is one delivery model – it’s being procured in parallel with a lot of on premise investments, as well as a lot of managed service investments. The future for a delivery model across the enterprise is going to be one of hybrid solutions. We’re already seeing in the Cloud space that there is an average of three providers for infrastructure as a service. The market is definitely branching out and testing the waters amongst a number of providers,” he said.
“That mix is leading to an environment where the CIO and the lines of business are going to have to have more of an understanding and more control over how they manage information intelligence.”
Additionally, many organisations are adopting Big Data software and applications, the study revealed.
“Forty two per cent of the enterprises are investigating the need for Big Data within their organisation. A lot of the people I see talk about a business case. They talk about cost. They see the cost of Big Data as one of the barriers to entry. But once they’ve spoken to the board, spoken to lines of business about a business case for Big Data, that barrier to entry can come down significantly if you can justify the investment. There may be Cloud solutions that can help reduce the barrier to entry – there may be package solutions on premise that can help reduce the barrier to entry.”
“With regard to Big Data and analytics, some of the emerging technologies around storage are designed to cope with high volumes and high transactional data inputs.
At the end of the day, it’s about business intelligence and business decision making - not just about collecting hundreds of millions or even billions of data points. If you look at the penetration of Big Data use in Australia it’s about 25 per cent of organisations above 20 employees where you have some Big Data practice. That includes legacy data processing,” he said.
