Nobody will deny that the world is creating extraordinary amounts of data which, thanks to compliance laws, must be preserved. Unless you run a data centre, you may have no idea of what is involved. Even relatively small companies can accumulate a lot of data. It is no wonder that storage is a growth industry.
Nelson Lam Ka-keung is the product director, enterprise storage and servers, technology solutions group, at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Hong Kong. He said large enterprises usually had a specialist who handled storage issues, but smaller companies often needed help.
'When it comes to storage decisions, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] who normally do not have a dedicated storage expert, many want the guidance of a trusted adviser,' he said. 'We can provide SMEs with a personalised technology experience so they can spend less time focused on IT [information technology] and more time focused on their businesses.'
Not all large companies, however, are in a madcap expansion. Cathay Pacific uses a fair amount of storage but it is manageable and, according to Ron Baillie, Cathay's architecture and technology manager, the company has its storage needs under control.
'We use about 60 terabytes which, compared to many organisations, is relatively modest. We do not see a lot of growth because of the nature of our business; for the most part we have no need to store vast amounts of transaction data. Where we do need it, however, is in our customer relationship management and loyalty programmes,' he said.
What is important to Cathay is support from the vendor. 'We want to know the vendor will be around for while,' Mr Baillie said. 'We tend to prefer vendors with a large installed base. That way, there is a far greater chance that any potential 'wrinkles' in new storage models and firmware will be found quickly.'
At the high end of storage, for companies dealing with very large amounts of data - usually in a very large database - it is no wonder that the database giant Oracle has a solution it worked out with HP. Launched just a short time ago, Oracle's Exadata storage was developed with the hardware giant HP. Oracle's chief executive Larry Ellison, speaking at the launch, said: 'For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage, designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is 10 times faster.'