Brief

NetApp study on data explosion

Surajit Sen, Director – Channels, Alliances and Markets, NetApp India discussing the findings of NetApp-Nielsen survey Data Explosion in India – Trends & Challenges

NetApp has announced the interim findings of its ongoing survey ‘Data Explosion in India – Trends & Challenges’. According to the NetApp-Nielsen survey, IT applications, including ERP and CRM amongst others (43%) followed by e-mails/attachments (19%) are the major sources of data growth in enterprises.

In terms of challenges, 24x7 data access (31%) and data proliferation (15%) are the major business challenges arising out of this express data growth as per respondents. Although mass enterprise IT adoption is a welcome trend, enterprises run the risk of an IT infrastructure breakdown in case they fail to adopt comprehensive data management solutions to manage the data explosion.

According to industry estimates, enterprises do not utilize less than half of the storage that they buy. In addition, much of the data stored on disk is redundant. Not only is this a waste of storage, it is a waste of power and floor space—all of which increase IT costs.

“The survey clearly reveals that IT applications (ERP, CRM, etc.) have emerged as the single most critical factor for data growth in organizations. This will escalate further in coming years considering the large volumes of transactions recorded by this type of IT applications on a daily basis. Replicating data at cost efficient intervals to ensure business continuity is the primary challenge resulting out of huge amounts of data growth,” said Surajit Sen, Director – Channels, Alliances and Markets, NetApp India.

Meanwhile, NetApp’s timely launch of its new storage solutions for virtualization and de-duplication will help enterprises to reduce capital and operating expenses, simplify manageability, increase reliability and improve energy efficiencies.

“NetApp’s solutions to enhance virtualized environments will help enterprises to regularly backup all client data while using as much as 90% less capacity than conventional storage for improved efficiencies,” added Sen.

Enterprises need to utilize the full potential of their current storage environments in order to match the growing demand. This will also help them defer additional primary storage purchases. Virtualization, i.e. running multiple instances of software (OS/applications) on the same underlying storage infrastructure is a key technology, which will enable enterprises to scale up their storage capacities and manage data growth efficiently.