By Joe Ong, managing director of Hitachi Data Systems Singapore
Outlining the perils of mass application adoption
The concept of working on-the-go in Asia has resulted in application developers experiencing a sudden increase in companies commissioning the creation of enterprise applications for the mobile workplace over the past 18 months. With data increasing at this monumental rate, the adoption of new applications has become a double-edged sword for many organizations.
As these business applications reaches mainstream adoption, data centers are now housing a wealth of information, on a variety of applications, that can help organizations improve their revenues and gain market share.
On the flip side, managing the data on these applications also pose risks for organizations. The massive amount of unstructured data created can clog network pipes, stretch storage resources and reduce data access performance.
This could lead to data center inefficiency, loss of vital information and storage management costs spiraling out of control.
Why convergence matters
A few reasons why data center convergence is now grabbing mindshare in the IT and business community are that it promises storage management simplification, reduction in overall costs and physical space at the data center facility.
Simply put, data center convergence introduces a new class of integrated servers that leverage on virtualization by combining processors, networking capabilities and storage innovations, in a commonly managed platform. This takes away the inefficiencies and costs of managing the vast array of devices, applications and components in a data center.
For customers, data center convergence translates into two main value propositions that can be immediately realized. It reduces the amount of actual equipment in the data center, which translates into lower management costs, less floor space needed, and reduced energy consumption.
Secondly, the convergence allows all data center components, whether they are servers, networks or content from mission-critical business applications, to be managed through one console. This drastically reduces the need for deploying multiple management tools, and the need to find expertise to manage each of them. It can also free up expensive IT manpower to other more value-adding tasks for the organization.
Combined, these two value propositions provide CIOs the necessary solution to tackle the proliferation of data and manage the deployment of new business applications more effectively. It also sets the foundations for cloud adoption, a key driver for new types of applications.
Becoming evolutionary instead of simply revolutionary
Considering that over 90 percent of companies in Asia Pacific today are small and medium businesses (SMBs), and these companies are expected to invest close to $1.5 billion in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and scalable public cloud applications (AMI Partners, 2012) data management will continue to be a business challenge.
CIOs will need to think about fine tuning data center infrastructure, and consider data center convergence as a critical part of the solution towards smooth cloud application deployment and management. This will enable data centers to become more aligned with business and market needs, and addresses current and future concerns about data availability and performance.
By ensuring that the building blocks to cloud enablement are within data center environments, cloud application adoption is well placed to become evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
Joe Ong is Managing Director for Hitachi Data Systems in Singapore. He has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry and is responsible for providing overall leadership in setting the company’s direction in Singapore. He is also focused on meeting local growth objectives and executing go-to-market strategies for Hitachi Data Systems’ business in Singapore.
