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Gartner Poll: Managing Storage Growth is IT’s #1 Challenge in 2012

By Brent Rhymes

Greetings from fabulous Las Vegas where iWave Software today announced our new automation product for enterprise storage systems, called iWave Storage Director.  
 
One of the things I like most about Gartner conferences is their instant pole of the audience. The second poll question asked in David Cappuccio’s excellent opening keynote address was, “What is the biggest challenge your IT organization will face in 2012?” Out of the 20 answers the audience could vote on, the need to manage storage growth was voted the number one challenge. I promise I only voted once.  
 
Gartner “gets” the challenge that storage growth is presenting to enterprise IT - so much so – that they have an entire track of classes here at the conference titled, “Modernizing your storage strategy to keep pace with burgeoning demand.” 
 
In his keynote, David continued to say that Gartner's revised estimate for enterprise storage growth over the next 5 years is 800 percent. He then noted that there were really two challenges when it comes to managing storage growth. First, organizations need to adopt tools and strategies to manage growth of the actual storage, including data de-duplication, auto-tiering and thin-provisioning. Secondly, organizations must get more efficient in how they support and administer the storage systems. 
 
We built iWave Storage Director to address that second challenge - to provide storage administrators with an automation platform that enables them to manage 800 percent growth. 
 
Our strategy for iWave Storage Director is to apply the technology and experiences we've gained in helping large organizations automate their public and private cloud environments to the world of enterprise storage. Our goal is to provide a powerful and flexible automation platform that enables our customers to transform storage administration from a device/technology-centric support center to a provider of on-demand, fully automated storage services. These services are delivered directly to storage consumers including DBAs, application developers and server support staff. 
 
This idea of transforming storage administration into a provider of automated storage services delivered on-demand, via private storage clouds was reinforced in a breakout session presented by Gartner Analysts Gene Ruth and Stanley Zaffos titled, “Building a Five-Year Storage Scenario.” Gene, in particular, emphasized the need for storage administrators to adopt a model for storage services. 
 
If you're out in Vegas attending the Gartner Data Center Conference, I encourage you to check out the breakout sessions in the “Modernizing Storage” track, as well as stop by the iWave booth (#59) to see a live demonstration of iWave Storage Director. 
 
Viva Las Vegas and Viva Storage Automation!