What kind of homework should an enterprise do before deciding on any network storage solution?

Owais Khan, business manager, storage products, Compaq India

An enterprise needs to take into consideration its long-term growth projection, and arrive at data generation and storage requirements. This would vary from enterprise to enterprise. Scalability and inter-operability of hardware and software from multiple vendors should be the most important criterion for enterprises, with rapidly growing storage requirements.

Additionally, data-intensive enterprises like ISPs and ASPs require storage solutions that are high on availability, manageability and resource sharing capabilities. Businesses should also take possible space constraints into account while planning for network storage solution. However, with the recent availability of density-optimized servers in the market, enterprises with massive data storage requirements can overcome space constraints.

T Srinivasan, country manager, EMC

The homework an enterprise should do is to identify the problem area in the existing traditional information setup. These problems could be:

• Storage capacity management of server

• Backup and retrieval problems

• Application unavailability for schedule and unscheduled downtime

• Servers, operating systems and storage consolidating issues

• Delay in developmental cycles due to the non-availability of information

• Project schedules do not match business requirements

• Cost objectives are difficult to achieve

• IT finds itself reactive, not proactive. The ability to manage change is therefore limited

Support for cross-organizational business processes is difficult, at best.

Once these problems have been identified, the operational and cost-benefit for consolidated enterprise storage solution becomes obvious.

Avijit Basu, marketing manager, (NSSO) business customer sales organization, HP

• From the backup point of view: how much data capacity, backup and restore window, existing network bandwidth, applications, frequency of backup, type of backup-full, differential, incremental. Are they looking at backup consolidation? Are they looking at backup over a network consolidation? Are they looking at automation in tape?

• From the data spread over the enterprise: Are you looking at business continuity, is outage a problem? If your applications are mission-critical, you cannot afford any downtime. Is managing data a problem? The storage is distributed, no one knows where free storage is available. The unpredictability of data growth is the name of the game. How does one manage the growth from multiple physical devices from a single logical management point? Is data so critical? Are you looking at disaster recovery system? Is bandwidth an issue?

Basu Hurkadli, country manager, system sales, IBM India

Customers today realize the importance of corporate information for their businesses and are looking for a solution that can address their total storage needs, which will help them in becoming a zero latency organization—one that enables free and immediate exchange of information. Today’s best optimal solution requires a mix of all storage networking options and technologies. Network storage centralizes storage management and also automates operation, thereby reducing IT operational costs and staffing requirements.

Enterprises need to evaluate their storage needs on obvious criteria, such as organizational objectives, current storage infrastructure, and what the alternatives are available to store and value their organization’s data more effectively.

Sharad Srivastava, country manager, Seagate India

Firstly, an enterprise needs to understand whether the demand for storage is high or low. If the storage requirement is doubling every six months, then the enterprise needs to have a good strategy in managing the storage requirement. Next step is to know the nature of the application, whether it is more towards file-sharing or storage-space sharing or both. Is the scalability critical? An enterprise should go through a checklist and review whether they should go into networked storage solution. The key task is to identify the problem in the IT environment or potential problem in the future, then establish a strategy to handle it. In some cases, a consultant may be able to assist them in providing a good picture.