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Computerworld

February 23, 2009 (Computerworld)  EMC Corp. today announced an upgrade to its entire line of Celerra network-attached storage systems, saying it will now offer solid-state disks and file-level data de-duplication on the arrays along with upgrades to its NAS gateway device.

The upgraded arrays include the NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 NAS gateway appliances, which attach to a Clariion or Symmetrix storage array to offer file-level data storage using the NFS or CIFS protocol.

Great news, anything we can do to help CIOs and end users with their data storage requirements, data de-dupliction can be a great way of reducing the amount of storage that you need, that your business consumes. Ultimately though we need to switch to the commodization and virtualization of storage, through tiering, through better and more effective management of our data. Understanding that there is real time market, trading and user data, that there is legacy deal capture, HR and back office data, that all these kinds of data have different requirements in terms of data retention, backup and availability, can we re-arrange where the data is stored, how available we need to make it, to be smarter in the way we manage and host our data. The main challenge with this as a corporate is that often the cheaper storage isn’t that much cheaper if you’re buying in volume, as a strategy therefore the economics can have an affect on how you provision your storage. Interestingly how we manage storage consumption remains a challenge, we keep often seeing situations where by the time I’ve purchased that next 5TB it’s already been allocated to projects, to specific business lines – we need therefore two things:

Business as usual data cleansing, data archiving and storage capacity upgrades

Project requirements and assesments – how much storage do you need now, what will you need next year and how much of that space you need has to be available online to the end users. If it’s legacy trading data, would a snapshot or a disk backup be good enough?

How do we charge for storage, how does this affect your storage consumption and importantly if I demand 300GB of online always available storage, is that more expensive than 300GB of which I only need the current months’ data online (30GB)?  Most importantly, are users willing to pay for this, at what point will we find our internal back office/administration tools have a higher marginal operating cost than business benefit? Do we have the infrastructure, the processes and the procedures to be able to archive off and return data on demand?

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