Exploring data center procurement decision-making-storage network and cloud storage

Exploring data center procurement decision-making-storage network and cloud storage

In the data center procurement decision-making series, in section 1 "exploring data center procurement decision-making"-blade servers and Software Defined network ", we introduced the IT administrator's decision-making on server and network facilities procurement and the influencing factors. In part 2 exploring data center procurement decision-making-virtualization management software and disaster recovery, 67% of IT and business experts want virtualization management software to monitor server availability. In addition, data center replication boosts the need to purchase disaster recovery. The third part describes the requirements of data centers for storage networks and cloud storage.

 

Data Centers spend money to simplify the management of storage networks

Data center procurement experts found that Ethernet-based storage networks are ready for simpler management and simpler infrastructure.

According to a TechTarget Network Infrastructure Survey, 61% of respondents said that the simplification of data center and storage network management was what they wanted most, in addition, 51% of visitors want to aggregate network operations in the data center.

The Integrated Network integrates data center and storage network traffic in the same network infrastructure, currently, the dominant data center architecture's storage network relies on a dedicated lossless network similar to the fiber Channel. Today, fiber Channel is still dominant in large enterprise data centers, and protocols like iSCSI and fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) indicate that they can be used as alternatives.

Even if the Ethernet technology promises not to lag far behind, the storage network management may be the biggest concern in the data center. 43% and 41% of respondents said they were interested in the selection of storage and Storage Virtualization/segmentation, all of which led to their loss of investment in Ethernet storage networks.

IT will purchase cloud storage for some surprising reasons

IT organizations purchase cloud storage for disaster recovery, while maintaining the load of internal storage systems.

In the return visit to the TechTarget cloud storage survey, the reason for purchasing cloud storage is that the proportion of backup, archiving and disaster recovery is 63%, 43%, and 42%, respectively. Another 50% of IT experts think that cloud storage can be the primary storage location for production data. In addition, 47% of visitors will purchase cloud storage for collaboration and file sharing reasons.

COO Rich Nowalk of Opex Technologies, a cloud consulting company in Raleigh, thinks that many companies now say that the infrastructure is not their core competency. This is not what they are doing. They need to prepare for application, service, and data analysis. These aspects are what they need to focus on and spend time on, not hardware.

Not all organizations can (or should) Place collaborative data on public cloud servers. Security and price are considerations. However, IT companies have discovered that purchasing cloud storage is much easier than installing a new storage array.

Ashish Nadkarni, project director at IDC Research, said: "The biggest benefit of cloud storage is pay-as-you-go. If the storage space is used up, you can buy more capacity immediately ".