From left: Allan Swann (ARN), Allan King (Infront Systems), James Sillence (EMC), Andrew Thomas (Thomas Duryea), Stefan Gillard (Engineroom.io), Rodney Gedda (Telsyte),
Anthony Davis (Nexenta), Jennifer O’Brien (ARN), Richard Denyer (Fusion Systems), Matthew Swinbourne (NetApp), Phil Lancaster (Bluechip Infotech)
HOT BUTTONS 2015
Nexenta APAC vice-president and general manager, Anthony Davis, said a hot button for 2015 will continue to be software defined storage. He said customers want Cloud economics, but on premise comfort, which is a key reason why many are embracing the software-defined infrastructure.
“Software defined infrastructure is all about commoditising the hardware and dramatically reducing costs in the process,” Davis said.
“The data set that’s growing the fastest is the unstructured data set: tier two and tier three data. We make a very bold statement to every customer and partner that we speak to and that is, ‘if you’ve got customers or you are a customer and you’re using tier one storage for tier two and tier three data, you’re literally getting millions of dollars and you’re sticking it in the toilet.”
Telsyte’s Gedda also looks to software defined storage as a growing market opportunity.
“I’m excited about software-defined storage, software-defined networking, although they’re quite disruptive technologies. We now have more ability to take control of the software and customise it and manage it the way we need for our business and improve our operations.”
Object storage is also considered worth a partner’s time. Also known as object-based storage, it is a storage architecture that manages data as objects. Other storage architectures, like file systems, manage data as a fi le hierarchy. Block storage manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks.
Infront Systems’ King said object storage is popular because Cloud computing is based on it.
“The reason object is probably so popular in Cloud is because it has got the principles of location independence. It allows you to scale without actually being constrained within a file system or knowing the exact location. It’s very easy to move around a couple of billion objects,” he said.
“You can scale and you can turn things off and shoot the cattle all you like, but it will ultimately exist somewhere and you don’t need to know.”
