A 'do-more-with-less' theme has emerged for information technology (IT) departments in companies across the board, as the impact of the global economic downturn forces them to slash costs, radically slow capital expenditure and hunt for greater returns on their technology investments.
For the most part, this rapid shift has had a negative effect on how organisations plan, implement and manage their technology infrastructure. However, one area of the technology landscape where this new theme is being viewed as a refreshing breath of air is in enterprise storage.
The problem in Hong Kong is that enterprise storage is still not a priority even though the volume of data has grown exponentially, according to industry figures. 'Typically, the view among [chief information officers] and [chief technology officers] is that it is easier to add more and more storage capacity because the costs keep falling,' said Andrew Sampson, general manager for Hitachi Data Systems in Hong Kong and Macau.
'However, the costs of cooling, rent and people are going up sharply. So it is not just about the hardware costs, but the total cost of ownership, which is not so easy to see.'
Hong Kong's IT executives are starting to seek innovative ways to store their booming data volumes, but in a cost-effective way that uses a lot of the infrastructure they already have. One of these is through storage virtualisation, which has enabled companies to roll out thin provisioning, according to Michael Chue, managing director for Symantec in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Typically, during the boom years, IT departments rolled out storage to meet their application requirements. So, if three applications all needed one terabyte of storage space each, the company would purchase three terabytes of disk space, regardless of the fact that they would initially be using only a small portion of this capacity, say 30 per cent for each.