Fujitsu Forum – Storage with a business focus

The latest additions to the Eternus storage systems range are aimed at helping fill the huge demand for storage capacity that never seems to diminish. But while it is easy to take storage as an issue in itself – and many large enterprises end up doing just this – Fujitsu found time at its annual Forum in Munich to set the subject in a wider context, where the scene was set by Rachael Dines, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

The company has recently undertaken some research into both the storage sector and its place in the context of large datacentres and its place in the minds of IT managements as part of the wider role of IT in the business.

She outlined the basic storage issues that affect every business these days, no matter how small. Enterprise data growth is running at around 60 percent per year, which compared to some estimates seems to be on the low side. But this growth rate leads to some important consequences, such as there now being no good time for downtime of any system.

There is also the issue of increased reliance by all businesses on the services and capabilities IT brings to them. So there is now a real need to keep and protect data. Coupling this with the growing pressure on users to be always on and always available – the result of both the growing pressure to gain and maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace and customer expectations of service availability in an increasingly global business – leads to a growing fear of any negative impact on the reputation of the business.

These lead to the continued increase in data growth and increased pressure on storage capabilities. For example, there is a growing fear amongst many businesses of deleting anything. It is, for example, hard to predict when an old data file might provide the vital gem for a big data analytics project, or when it might be necessary to establish that certain documents do exist and when they were created or modified.

And in addition, existing applications continue to generate updated and reworked version of existing data.

Against this then has to be set the Forrester finding that only one in three business leaders believe their IT is well-aligned to meet their business needs. And only one in 10 says it drives forward business innovation.

“So the question is, how to move forward,” Dines said. “The move to using software defined datacentres is going in the right direction,  but we need more – a move to the business-defined datacentre. This also points to having a universal infrastructure, though many users currently still think in terms of having specialised infrastructures for each application or function, which is staying with the old silo model. In reality, however 80 percent of all applications requirements can be serviced by one infrastructure.”

She also suggested that there is also a need to use more automation, otherwise applications and process complexity and change can accelerate out of control. “Automation is the only way to innovate, by freeing up the budget and resources to make innovation possible,” she said.

Fujitsu’s response to this is with the introduction of additions to its Eternus range of storage systems. Though targeted at the entry level and mid-range market sectors they are scalable to multiple Petabyte level.

The Eternus DX S3 disk storage arrays and latest release of the Eternus SF V16 system management software are said  to deliver business-centric systems that are flexible and adaptable to users’ business priorities, instead of allowing the technology to rule over its users.

There are four new DX disk systems, the scalable entry-level Eternus DX100 S3 and DX200 S3 models and the midrange Eternus DX500 S3 and DX600 S3. All provide support for data consolidation projects by being seamlessly integrated with unified NAS and SAN connectivity.

They also offer what the company claimed is the highest resource utilisation level available in storage systems, at up to 90 percent. This, the company suggests, is a significant departure from conventional storage wisdom that system capacity should not exceed 50 percent to avoid slow system response times.

The company has also introduced a new automated quality of service management system, which means that storage professionals no longer need to perform complex and costly tuning to set required response time for high-priority applications. This increases operational efficiency and enables storage professionals to more easily maintain critical service levels.

All the new systems can be configured as unified storage systems with seamless integrated block and file, and SAN and NAS capabilities. In a major difference from simple gateway architectures, this unified functionality is seamlessly integrated within storage controllers, resulting in a consistent user experience, and providing the ability to share all high availability and failover functionalities for SAN and NAS operations across storage controllers.