Any build-versus-outsource decision could be viewed through the prism of core competence-increasing performance and organizational delivery through a focus on its core value activities. Unfortunately, in the past, multiple extraneous factors muddied the perspective. The key difference is that when an activity is core and business critical, it will receive top-level attention and focus. An IT team’s time should be dedicated to the activities that provide a strategic advantage to the enterprise and allow resources to be focused only on those key areas. The decision to outsource a data center requires careful examination of options at a strategic level from a business vision perspective and a thorough tactical evaluation on an operating plane involving asset inventories, facility requirement estimations and budgetary considerations.

Outsourcing Versus Building a Data Center

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Data Center

Many organizations—whether small, medium or large and across various industry verticals—have realized that outsourcing their data centers is the best way to align IT and business in the most cost-effective manner. Many important business benefits are associated with outsourcing: organizations can gain higher operational and financial efficiencies, enjoy proactive monitoring and management of their hosted IT infrastructure, and increase customer satisfaction, all while staying focused on their core business areas.

The benefits not only include protection of IT infrastructure from technology obsolescence, but they also allow maximum freedom and flexibility in daily IT operations, while simultaneously lowering financial and operational overheads. Benefits include:

• Align to changing business needs
• Compliance with corporate governance
• Cost advantage
• Custom solutions
• Scalable IT operations to meet growing business demand
• Access to latest technology
• Business continuity
• Accountability through SLAs
• Access to skilled expertise
• Energy-efficient data centers
• High availability and reliability
• Realize the true potential of IT—not just manage costs

What Is Being Outsourced?

Typical areas delegated to managed and outsourced datacenter providers include:

• Trouble ticketing and help desk
• End-user support and infrastructure operations
• Hardware maintenance and network operations
• Monitoring and management (server, systems and so on)
• Security
• HVAC
• Disaster recovery, storage management and backup (power, data)
• Full functionality and support of all elements within the data center

The TCO Advantage

Predicting and measuring total cost of ownership (TCO) for the physical infrastructure of network rooms and data centers is required for return-on-investment (ROI) analysis and other business decision processes. In addition, an understanding of the cost drivers of TCO provides insight into opportunities to control costs.

Organizations today will need to assess the benefits of a build or buy decision on the basis of the impact of IT enablement, business continuity, process excellence, privacy and compliance requirements—in line with board vision and cost compulsions. And as businesses look further afield at outsourcing or out-locating their data centers, they need to carefully evaluate the providers in various geographies. The spectrum of decision factors will range from management mandates to energy efficiency.

Related Links: Data centers in India, Internet data center, Data Center in Chennai, Data Center in Mumbai

About the Author

Jayabalan Subramanian is the Chief Technology Officer and cofounder of Netmagic Solutions Pvt. Ltd. He is recognized in the industry as an expert on internetworking and has consulted with leading organizations including BAFL, BPL, Bharti, Worldtel, and Hathway Internet, among others.

Photo courtesy of Mark Hillary

Asian Data Center Markets Have Momentum

Zacks Investment Research, in reporting on data center acquisitions by Equinix in Asia (“Equinix Adds Capacity in Asia”), notes that “Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore… [create] an opportunity for Equinix to expand its footprint across the Asia-Pacific. Those three regions happen to be the fastest-growing data center markets.” These Asian markets are driven by a number of political and economic factors, as well as by deteriorating conditions in the west.

As Asian (particularly Chinese) economies grow, a vast, relatively untapped population is increasingly being exposed to technologies like cell phones and computers. These segments are discovering the potential—both personal and business—of IT as a means of communication and progress. But to support this emerging demand, infrastructure must be built to provide the necessary services. Companies beyond the borders of China, Singapore and other Asian nations also see the potential of this emerging market: Equinix is just one example. Search-engine giant Google is also targeting Asia, as the Data Center Journal noted (“Notable Data Center Builds and Expansions”): “The company is spending $300 million to build its third Asian data center—this time in Taiwan—summing to a total of more than $700 million when including Google’s data centers under construction in Hong Kong and Singapore, according to ZDNet.”

Not on Top of the World, Yet

These Asian markets are seeing strong data center growth owing to an emerging economy with rising standards of living and increasing reliance on IT. But China, for instance, still has a ways to go to catch up with the west. Despite having almost four times the population of the U.S. (upwards of 1.3 billion), China still lags the U.S. in gross domestic product (GDP) by half according to the International Monetary Fund (via Wikipedia). On a per capita basis, this translates to an average Chinese GDP almost one-tenth that of the U.S. To some extent, however, this difference is mitigated by a much lower cost of living in China. Furthermore, China’s national debt is much lower than that of the U.S., however you slice it (absolute terms, as a percent of GDP or per capita).

To translate this growth momentum into economic leadership (in the data center sector or elsewhere), the momentum must be sustained for some time. Emerging Asian economies like China seem to have tremendous potential, but they are still burdened by a number of factors, including communist political systems (although some of these governments are apparently moving toward nominal communism rather than practical communism). Thus, whether this strong growth is sustainable is open to some doubt.

Lousy Conditions in the West

No doubt part of Asia’s growth leadership is due to economic conditions in western nations. Some of these nations, such as the U.S., are facing government debts in excess of 100% of GDP. Realistically, such high debts can never be repaid—particularly when deficit spending continues unabated—meaning these nations face the prospect of high inflation (which effectively destroys savings to reduce debt values) or a default, either of which will have adverse effects on the respective economies. Combined with regularly expanding regulations, taxes and anything else governments can do to make doing business impossible, these economic conditions make growth a dim prospect.

Nevertheless, although the data center industry suffered (like all other industries) during the recent recession and subsequent stagnation, it remains a fairly strong industry, even in the west. But companies looking for greater growth opportunities are looking to markets like China—with its emerging economy and huge population—as a new source of profits. For these companies, the potential rewards of gaining a foothold in these markets are worth the risks associated with investing in a region with vastly different culture and different rules and regulations.

Still Some Risk

Again, strong growth doesn’t necessarily mean a leadership position. In fact, although markets like China and Singapore offer some tremendous potential benefits, they also carry a variety of risks. According to the Cushman & Wakefield and hurleypalmerflatt Data Centre Risk Index 2012, the U.S.—in spite of all its economic problems—remains the top choice for a stable location for a data center. China, on the other hand, ranks at position 26 in the results. Singapore is slightly higher at the 17^th position, and Hong Kong leads all Asian regions at a strong 8^th position.

Nevertheless, despite the risks, companies see the potential rewards. According to Zacks, “As per recent studies conducted by research firms Frost and Sullivan and Gartner, data center growth in the Asia-Pacific will be the most sought after. Gartner also expects China to grow into the second largest global data center market by 2015.”

Conclusions

Overall, Asian markets are presenting a number of opportunities, owing to their emerging markets, large populations and even—to some extent—political conditions. Unlike western nations, which tend to think that the answer to the economic problems (which were largely caused by government meddling) is more government meddling via greater regulations and taxes, nations like China appear to be moving in the opposite direction. The result of these and other influences is a strongly growing data center market in Asian regions—particularly Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai. As mentioned above, Gartner sees China reaching second place in the data center rankings by 2015—a mere few years away. Backed by growth in other sectors of the economy combined with a lower debt burden, China could reach the top spot quickly.

The west, despite being the historical leader in technology in general and data centers in particular, faces a difficult future trying to keep pace with eastern nations. Instead of focusing on trade and economic stability, it is focusing on military endeavors around the world and on dubious political projects at home. The U.S. in particular looks increasingly like ancient Rome—eventually, barring a change in fortune, the centers of knowledge and progress will simply move elsewhere. That may be occurring now, and the growth of the data center markets in Asia are one indicator. Needless to say, only time will tell how the markets will ultimately play out.

Photo courtesy of mrkathika

The Global Issue: Population and Industrial Development Exceeding Existing Infrastructure

The global statistics are in, and the findings are eye opening, as Figure 1 outlines. Over the next two decades, demand for electricity is forecasted to grow by 40 percent in the U.S. alone. Increased demand is most dramatic in Asia, averaging 4.7 percent per year until 2030. And while Africa accounts for over one-sixth of the world’s population, the country only generates 4 percent of global electricity. As a country, India loses 28 percent of the electricity it carries. In South America, demand for electricity is projected to double over the next few years, outstripping generation capacity and the aging infrastructure, thus causing increasing power disturbances.

Figure 1: The global issue: population and industrial development is growing more rapidly than the existing power infrastructure can handle.

This exponential growth means increased stress on the grid, which in turn means more strain on individual electronic items, reducing lifespan, lowering reliability and affecting everyday life.

Electronics Power Protection Landscape

Today’s electronics are pervasive, and the majority of equipment is deployed with insufficient protection, resulting in damage from power grid disturbances, which are surprisingly frequent and destructive. All electronic equipment has two things in common: it needs power to operate, and it is significantly affected by power interruptions. Digital electronics are much more susceptible to glitches, and the evolution of electronics equipment has opened the possibility for more power-related issues. According to Electronic Power Research Institute (EPRI), the consequences of these daily loss-generating disturbances has been called “the most important concern affecting most industrial and commercial customers,” as they cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually to businesses in the United States alone.

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), enterprise companies, data centers and even consumers, until now, have relied on either UPS or surge protection to shield equipment from grid fluctuations, thinking that these devices adequately protect electronics from damage. UPSs offer protection and effectiveness from a technical standpoint by isolating electronics from the grid and powering them by battery. The downside, however, is that UPSs are expensive for most applications and too large to integrate into electronics. Thus, users either choose not to protect their equipment at all or turn to inexpensive surge protection or power strips that only shield electronics from less than one percent of damaging power disturbances. One of the greatest limitations of power strips is their inability to handle high voltage surges, making them practically useless in terms of electronics protection. In addition to risks from an already unstable power grid, digital electronics are microprocessor-based, leaving them susceptible to power fluctuations.

Evolution of Electronics

Although the grid globally remains unreliable, electronic equipment that defines modern life has become highly sophisticated, using a substantial amount of energy—with each new generation of devices more hungry than the last. In addition to its energy consumption, the majority of this equipment is being deployed with insufficient power protection and suffers from an extreme amount of power grid activity that is costing the industry an estimate of tens of billions of dollars annually in lost data, materials and productivity[1].

Grid Disturbances & Fluctuations

Increasing demand for electricity is putting enormous pressure on a grid not equipped to support such heavy usage. In a CNN article[2] regarding the rise in U.S. electricity blackouts, experts on the nation’s electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers. Research performed at the University of Minnesota indicates that over the past two decades, blackouts have increased 124 percent, yet blackouts are merely one of the ways in which the power grid affects connectivity. Electronics are affected by an infinite number of uncontrollable variables ranging from voltage surges and spikes to voltage sags, power outages, overvoltages and brownouts. Even a one-second outage can damage equipment and disrupt operations to the point where labor becomes impaired as systems are reset and brought back online.

In addition to power outages, even a minor voltage fluctuation or other disruption of the electrical signal can wreak havoc. Research indicates surges are not as severely damaging compared with the frequent and potentially destructive disturbances emitted from power grids. Far greater damage can be the result of voltage sags, brownouts, overvoltage conditions and power outages, which may have grave consequences as they relate to reliability and overall lifespan. Electrical disturbances of all types occur frequently, as Figure 2 highlights, and although we may not see an immediate effect such as a blackout, disturbances on the grid can still have lasting implications on our devices.

Figure 2: The inherently chaotic power grid is caustic to connected electronics and affected by an infinite number of uncontrollable variables.

Mounting Costs

The Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society commissioned a study in 2009 to obtain a definitive estimate of the direct costs of power disturbances to U.S. businesses. The study sought to quantify the cost of brief outages—for example, outages of one second or a couple of minutes long—unlike previous studies that have confined their analysis to lengthier outages of one hour or longer even though shorter outages are more common and can cause data loss and damage to industrial equipment. The study revealed the following:

• The average cost of a one-second outage among industrial and digital-economy firms is $1,477, versus an average cost of $2,107 for a three-minute outage and $7,795 for a one-hour outage.
• Digital-economy establishments report that 49 percent of the outages they experience last less than three minutes.
• Add all that up and the U.S. economy is losing between $104 billion and $164 billion each year to outages.

Additionally, a study by EPRI from 2005 suggests that the cost to the North American industry of production stoppages caused by voltage sags now exceeds $250 billion per year.

Wide Range of Industries Feel the Impact

The grid is relied on by a wide variety of industries ranging from consumer devices including laptops and televisions to sophisticated medical equipment. All of these industries use power to function and are affected differently by an unreliable power source.

Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics, like all electronics, are vulnerable to power-related glitches such as equipment lock ups and resets, service calls for unknown stoppages and modem problems. According to a report by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and Business Monitor International (BMI), the average U.S. household has 24 consumer electronics products, contributing to the growth in the consumer electronics devices market, which is expected to increase from $253.5 billion in 2011 to $322.9 billion by 2015. The latest projected figures from GfK Digital World, produced in partnership with Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), reveal global spending on consumer technology devices will surpass $1 trillion in 2012 for the first time. This is an increase of 5 percent over 2011’s figure of $993 billion. Consumer electronics devices range from TVs and personal devices to laptops, smartphones and audio equipment, and the industry as a whole can be segmented into entertainment, productivity and communications categories. In addition, consumer electronics accounts for 15 percent of global residential electricity consumption. This continued massive growth of digital electronics creates the possibility for additional power-related issues.

Data Centers on the Rise

Beyond consumer devices, more than ever, companies are moving IT infrastructure to data centers. Emerson, a networking provider who recently commissioned a study on the global data center phenomenon, revealed that there are over 509,000 data centers of varying sizes across the globe. These data centers combined accommodate the 1.2 trillion gigabytes of data created every day. In addition, despite stalled growth during the recession, IDC estimates approximately $22 billion will be spent on new data center development worldwide this year alone. Although downtime may be extremely low at data centers, damaging power disturbances are a very common, costly occurrence. To make matters worse, according to a data center report in 2010, problems with UPS equipment and configuration are the most frequently cited cause of data center outages. As a result, there is a growing movement to discover and implement a solution to add additional protection for these electronic assets without incurring massive cost, size and service requirements.

Invaluable Medical Technology

The need for reliable power goes beyond consumer electronics and data centers; another example is the global medical technology market. The medical device industry is large, intensely competitive and highly innovative, with annual worldwide sales in 2009 exceeding $220 billion according to Zacks Equity Research. A study performed five years ago by the U.S. International Trade Commission discovered that the United States, EU and Japan together account for approximately 90 percent of the global production and consumption of medical devices. The study also discovered that the U.S. medical device industry is the most competitive in the world, having been recognized for its ability to continually design, develop and place medical devices in U.S. and foreign markets. When improving the reliability of technology and services for the medical field, it’s critical for manufacturers and electronic equipment designers to remember the complexity of today’s digitally advanced world, which is largely affected by the power grid. If medical equipment malfunctions, it can have an immediate impact on patients, doctors and nurses. Given the sheer importance and monetary value, it’s necessary to understand the significance of protecting this equipment from power disturbances. The current solutions in place are expensive to acquire, costly to maintain and increasingly difficult and expensive to dispose of when replaced. Owing to these limitations, electronic equipment serving the medical industry is either protected at too great a cost or not protected at all.

A Solution: A New Approach in Power Protection Technology

New technology developed by Innovolt provides electronics power protection technology designed to guard against damage from 99.5 percent of power interruptions and is accessible to and effective for all electronics, regardless of size. This technology manages the impact of power disturbances and effectively increases the lifespan, reliability and efficiency of electronics equipment. According to Innovolt, companies that have deployed its technology have seen a decrease in service calls on protected equipment.

Innovolt has developed an intelligent electronics protection platform that in comparison with traditional surge protection and filtering technologies is a cost-effective, viable and proven long-term option for electronics protection. Similar to UPS systems, the technology provides immunity from grid and line disturbances, yet with a greater success rate, increased functional form-factor and more affordable design. Fortune Global 500 OEMs including Ricoh and Toshiba as well as other companies including Konica Minolta, ECi OMD and Katun have been quick to adopt Innovolt’s technology platform, a move that signifies the critical need for electronics equipment protection.

Electronic disturbances can occur at any time, without warning. With risks such as decreased profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction, businesses and consumers cannot afford to risk leaving their electronics unprotected. As we continue investing in new technology, we must understand the severity and implications of exposing our costly investments before it is too late. Innovolt’s ultimate future goal for electronics protection is to improve performance, reliability and longevity of equipment and reduce the number of service calls.

About the Author

Jeff Spence joined Innovolt as President and COO in 2010 after more than 15 years in executive and corporate development roles growing worldwide companies in the energy, finance, telecommunications and technology sectors across five continents and dozens of countries. In addition to his leadership roles with Innovolt, Spence continues to consult to the industry regarding sales, corporate finance, technology, business incubation and international business development. He is an active speaker across multiple industries and disciplines, having appeared at high-profile conferences including Comdex, Networld+Interop, The Homeland Security Summit, and the International Autobody Congress & Exposition (NACE). In addition, Spence has counseled policy groups including the United Nations, the European Union, and a host of other government and business groups on subjects ranging from economic development, entrepreneurialism, sales and marketing to government intervention and monetary policy.

“Why can’t this site be as easy as Facebook?”

Like it or not, industry leaders like Facebook are shaping consumers’ expectations for all the websites and web applications they interact with. Trends like mobility and cloud computing are driving a seismic shift—where consumers, as opposed to companies and their IT teams, are in control of how, where and when they’ll connect to a company.

Welcome to the “New Normal” of IT, which is taking off a lot faster than most anticipated and is forcing companies to completely rethink their IT strategies. Today’s consumers expect websites and applications to just work—period—24×7, via their preferred mode of web access, be it a desktop, tablet or smartphone. And when it doesn’t work, these consumers—who have very little brand loyalty and even less patience—have no qualms about finding a competing product or service elsewhere. According to the Aberdeen Group, two seconds or less is the new threshold consumers will wait before growing frustrated and abandoning a slow-performing website or application. Those companies whose IT infrastructures aren’t up to task are putting customer satisfaction, brand image and ultimately revenues squarely on the line.

In this new world, technologies like smartphones and tablets tend to garner a huge amount of attention, for fashion almost as much as function. But they are just one part of an increasingly complex application delivery chain that can extend all the way back to the mainframe. The reality is that, far from being “on the way out,” the mainframe is an increasingly integral and important part of this “New Normal”; in fact, its relevance is growing quickly as it supports critical customer-facing applications and processes billions of transactions per day. This article explores the “New Normal of Mainframe,” the changes it is eliciting from IT, the threat of the looming mainframe skills shortage and what companies can do to ensure they—and their mainframe developers—are optimally positioned to deliver on exceedingly high consumer demands for service.

Who’s My Customer?

As an industry, we’re at a critical transition point. Part of the “New Normal of Mainframe” is a shift in “customers” from internal users to external consumers. For example, application users are no longer limited to internal employees like tellers in a bank. Today, the user is the actual paying consumer—everyday people who may be checking their account balances on their smartphones once or even several times a day. Companies are no longer in control because consumers decide when and how to connect with the bank, and they expect fast, relevant and engaging functionality; they are willing to change whom they do business with very quickly if their interactions with a company’s website don’t live up to their expectations.

The “New Normal of Mainframe” Creates Many More Customer Touchpoints for the Mainframe

Today, the number of times the mainframe is “touched” in the course of a consumer interaction is increasing exponentially. The proliferation of consumers on smartphones places new demands on IT everywhere, but in certain industries like retail, smartphones provide the added advantage of opening a personal marketing channel to customers—the so-called “market of one.” Through smartphones, retailers can conduct real-time targeted marketing to individual customers with unparalleled speed, consistency and precision. Many retailers rely on advanced data analytics running on the mainframe to enable this highly individualized target marketing.

Consider also the banking industry: years ago, people checked their account balances maybe once a week, by accessing an ATM or going into the bank and asking a teller. The mainframe “fed” that information to a single user (the teller) one time. Today, many consumers check their account balances via their smartphones, at least once a day if not several times throughout the day. In retail, the mainframe once “fed” product pricing information to store clerks at the point of sale. Today, consumers themselves may check the price of a product across multiple stores using a smartphone. Also, a typical online order transaction may hit numerous mainframes across several IT environments as the consumer searches product inventory, makes a purchase by entering credit card information and arranges shipment. The net result is that the number of certain types of transactions hitting the mainframe can increase dramatically. And because the mainframe is now part of the application delivery chain, the speed of response has a critical impact on the end-user experience

In the “New Normal of Mainframe,” mainframe applications are key to connecting businesses with customers, and the mainframe itself is a pivotal part of the modern application delivery chain. This means IT organizations must integrate new cloud and mobile applications with legacy mainframe applications at a record pace—often in a specialized development environment—while ensuring those applications deliver superior quality and performance.

Mainframe Skills Shortage Looms

At the same time, as mainframe applications become more customer-facing, complex and difficult to maintain, the mainframe technology industry faces a critical skills shortage. This puts businesses at risk for costly and reputation-damaging application failures. According to a recent independent research study into mainframe use conducted by Vanson Bourne, 71 percent of CIOs are concerned that the looming mainframe skills shortage will hurt their business. Specifically, CIOs are concerned this will result in increased application risk (58 percent), reduced productivity (58 percent) and more project overruns (53 percent).

Banking at home, paying your credit card provider online and making travel reservations are just a few examples of modern applications powered by mainframe applications. There can be a dark side to the extended enablement of mainframe applications, however. Poor application quality no longer affects company insiders alone; it now affects the customer and can literally translate to multi-million dollar losses if customers are alienated by a poor experience and take their business elsewhere.

To better prepare for the looming skills shortage, businesses using a mainframe must attract top developers and empower them to maximize productivity while maintaining efficiencies gained over the years. This means businesses must give their developers, particularly the newer generation, the tools they need to do their jobs successfully, all while ensuring a smooth knowledge transfer from more-experienced generations and extending the value of existing mainframe investments.

To this end, there can be tremendous value in creating a “bridge” between the newer and less experienced and the more-experienced “veteran” generations of mainframe developers—a modernized, intuitive development environment that increases less experienced developers’ comfort level with the mainframe and makes them happier while shortening their mainframe learning curve.

Conclusion: Succeeding in the “New Normal of Mainframe”

Throughout the years, mainframe systems have maintained their unique niche in supporting some of the most throughput-intensive and business-critical applications around the world. Financial services firms, healthcare providers, government agencies, telecom companies, manufacturers, shipping companies, retailers and other industries all rely on the speed, reliability, security and integrity of the mainframe.

Mainframe applications have changed substantially over the past several years as they interweave with new technologies like mobility and the cloud. It’s never been more important to have the tools and people in place to ensure mainframe applications deliver superior quality and performance. A modern mainframe development approach can be the key to maximizing productivity, cost-efficiency and IT and business agility, helping mainframe users succeed in this “New Normal of Mainframe.”

About the Author

Dennis O’Flynn is director of product management for Compuware’s Mainframe Business Unit.

Image courtesy of vaxomatic

Data center capacity is the aggregate capacity of all data center assets. These assets extend beyond the physical and virtual systems of an IT infrastructure to the equipment that powers and regulates the actual data center climate and environment. Capacity is not easy to manufacture, nor does it comes cheaply. Today, IT must rethink data center capacity management from a “what’s required now” mentality to a far more strategic vision of dynamic capacity allocation. Forced to juggle its priorities between business demands and increasingly complex data center provisioning strategies, IT is even more hampered by a flat or only marginally growing budget.

Under such tight conditions, data centers have no room for capacity mismanagement. Overprovisioning servers is an unacceptable money drain on the organization, and capacity shortages can cause performance degradation or even service disruption. Because business advantage and competitiveness depend so much on both an enhanced technology infrastructure and the optimized capacity to run it, the data center must shift pace and become more agile—ready to anticipate urgent new business demands and embrace new technologies while remaining within its current cost structure.

Achieving data center agility requires optimized capacity based on a unified view of data center performance starting at the individual asset level. Comprehensive asset visibility, analysis and control are the prerequisites for every agile data center.

Data Center Performance Management (DCPM): The Business and Data Center Agility Imperative

Data center performance management (DCPM) takes a unified approach to benchmarking and forecasting—against dynamic business needs—of the aggregate performance of data center assets. This unified approach is highlighted by Forrester Research analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani in his 2011 article “If you don’t manage everything, you don’t manage anything,” offering a clear message: failure to monitor one element can lead to the failure of the entire system. Specifically, Garbani draws attention to the failed design of an early-generation Citroen 2CV gas gauge as an analogy to explain why IT should focus on all components of the IT infrastructure: the minimalist approach of the highly efficient car used a dipstick, as opposed to a dashboard gas gauge, that often left drivers stranded when they forgot to check the dipstick for the fuel level in the tank. This is an example of “a great means of transportation [that] failed regularly for lack of instrumentation.”

Garbani emphasizes that application performance management (APM) must take a unified approach to managing IT infrastructure—hardware, software, virtual and physical—and ensure that all components perform to keep an application up and running in an optimized fashion.

Data center performance management takes this APM model one step further, measuring not only IT asset utilization and response time but also environmental metrics such as power utilization and peak demand against business objectives. Why? Failure of one underlying component supporting the IT infrastructure (e.g., maxed-out power capacity) could disrupt business-critical applications and processes. With the data center being at the core of every business-critical application, IT shortens the path to agility by taking a holistic approach to managing data center performance—by accurately analyzing forecasting and planning for system and environmental variables so as to ensure uptime and available capacity of every ongoing and upcoming project.

DCPM requires three foundational capabilities to deliver capacity, performance and agility: visibility, analysis and control.

1. Visibility. Broad, deep and continuous monitoring unites comprehensive asset visibility with performance trends to give IT both “in the moment” and historical performance intelligence about all the data center resources that support its business-critical applications. Myriad application performance and enterprise management software exist today, but they provide only a partial view of their attributes. What IT needs is a “manager of managers” approach to monitoring. This approach uses the integration of physical and virtual systems along with any enterprise/IT asset management and building management systems already in place for a unified view of the data center.
2. Analysis. Continuous performance analysis correlates individual asset KPIs—such as computational utilization, memory, storage, network and power—and compares them against each asset’s capacity limit to determine available headroom, or it analyzes the historical maximum/minimum/average capacity for performance comparison. These measurements bring critical insights into each component’s current operating capacity, as well as highlighting potential bottlenecks and wasted resources that demand attention. Using DCPM, IT can pinpoint which applications are the major consumers of each resource and drill down into the root causes of resource contention or capacity shortages. IT can also investigate virtual-machine memory allocation as well as storage oversubscription or peak power demands of the physical environment by analyzing deviations from planned efficiencies. This analysis is a continuous, iterative process that must begin with baseline measurements of workloads, systems and equipment. Having a historical perspective on consumption, utilization and costs, IT will be able to analyze variances and take action to improve data center performance through accurate demand forecasts and what-if planning.
3. Control. Capacity forecasting and what-if planning gives IT hands-on control to ensure data center agility. DCPM functions can accurately portray current resource usage and available capacity for new applications on the basis of a specific asset’s historical resource consumption and its ongoing utilization patterns. In addition, continuous capacity planning enables IT to forecast which physical or virtual assets can effectively serve specific applications or workloads, giving IT the ability to proactively shift workloads on the fly to more suitably assets and better meet the dynamic needs of the business.

In addition to forecasting asset utilization and capacity, DCPM provides what-if scenarios to help IT evaluate cost/performance tradeoffs for multiple hardware options and service deployment strategies: virtualization, cloud computing, server consolidation, hardware refresh and so on. Approaching this type of planning manually, using spreadsheets or a hodgepodge of planning tools, requires “an army of elves” to map, track and analyze change and its related impact. With DCPM, IT can automate data center capacity planning by focusing on the important objectives: providing accurate data center capacity forecasts and appropriate data center capacity to meet business needs.[1]

DCPM With Six Sigma

By combining a DCPM platform with the Six Sigma DMAIC best-practice framework for capacity planning, IT and data center professionals can achieve continuous data center resource optimization via the following steps:

1. Define data center goals: IT initializes the capacity planning process by setting the overall data center SLA and key metrics against business goals, followed by identifying future requirements and trends.

2. Measure data center baseline: Through its extensive library of connectors and integration with enterprise management software, a DCPM platform delivers comprehensive data center infrastructure metrics for baseline measurements. Where asset connectivity is not directly available, virtual meters and inference engines could fill in the gaps, providing highly accurate inferred metrics. The resultant baseline measurements allow IT to compare actual data center performance with their overall performance targets, as well as to spotlight any variance from that baseline over time.

3. Analyze data center variances: A DCPM platform can provide rich and complete history by way of correlating data across multiple data centers. Using in-memory data storage and query techniques, time-series precalculations and various other performance optimizations, a DCPM can present root-cause analysis of these variances and help in the formulation of corrective actions.

4. Improve data center infrastructure: A DCPM can use what-if scenarios for assessing new workloads and application deployment strategies, evaluating new equipment, or determining capacity for VM placement. These scenarios not only help IT evaluate and select the best scenario but also accurately forecast and plan for the capacity needed to support new application rollouts or increased demand.

4a. Forecast utilization and capacity: A DCPM platform uses historical consumption and utilization patterns of assets to predict their future demand and available capacity.

4b. Plan with what-if scenarios: A DCPM platform should auto-populate key parameters with smart default values (which are calculated from real utilization, consumption and cost data), allowing IT to predict operating impact on the basis of asset changes.

4c. Select best scenario: A DCPM platform would allow IT to compare, choose and save desired scenarios.

4d. Execute on the selected plan: A DCPM platform routes the selected plan to service desk tickets (in HP, BMC, IBM Tivoli and so on).

4e. Check actual performance against plan: A DCPM platform compares baseline performance against the selected plan, providing IT with intelligent insights leading to corrective actions.

5. Control data center operations: A DCPM platform should provide real-time monitoring for new variances, enabling IT to repeat plan-do-check-act steps continuously to correct variances.

5a. Check variance against plan: A DCPM platform alerts and reports on threshold crossing.

5b. Analyze root causes: A DCPM platform drills down to details of failure and determines what to fix.

5c. Act to resolve problems: A DCPM platform should route issues to service desk tickets for problem resolution.

Through this intelligent capacity planning process, IT/data center professionals can see whether available physical and virtual IT infrastructure, power, and space capacity exist to support the upcoming application rollout. The capacity forecast and performance prediction reduce risk by enabling IT to analyze cascading impacts of upcoming projects before installing any systems.

DCPM is at the heart of the agile data center. With clear insight into downstream resource requirements, IT can focus on implementing the necessary changes to operate—continuously—at optimum capacity, meeting the requirements that support an agile business.

About the Author

Bob Ertl is senior director of product management at Sentilla Corporation (www.sentilla.com), headquartered in Redwood City, Calif. Before joining Sentilla in 2011, Bob worked in product management roles at Oracle, Hyperion Solutions and Brio Software. He is available for questions and comments at bob.ertl@sentilla.com.

Why Pick on the Biggies?

Large companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Are making rather impressive efforts to incorporate renewable power sources (like solar) into their data center energy diets, and they are building facilities with impressively low PUEs. Given some estimates of average data center PUE across the entire industry are around 2.0, construction of a facility with a PUE of 1.1 or lower (for instance, Yahoo!’s Lockport data center, which has a claimed PUE of 1.08) is quite admirable. Many of these extremely low-PUE facilities are built by these mega companies—so why is Greenpeace picking on the big names and not the smaller companies, many of which operate facilities with much higher PUEs?

No doubt, part of the reason is exposure. Almost everyone has heard of Facebook and Apple, so when Greenpeace picks on these companies, it is able to ride the fame (or notoriety) of these companies into the headlines. Obviously, attacking the ABC company of Nowheresville won’t garner the same attention as an attack on Microsoft.

Concomitantly, the large companies are the ones with lots of money. And Greenpeace does nothing to hide its desire for these companies to lobby the government for a certain type of energy policy—in other words, the environmental gadfly is trying to maneuver these companies into doing its work (and paying for it). And these large companies often oblige for fear of being labeled an enemy of the environment, although no doubt some of their efforts are simply token in nature.

What’s Greenpeace’s Beef?

Greenpeace’s recent report looks at companies’ reliance on coal and nuclear energy, as well as their efficiency, use of renewable energy, choice of location and similar considerations, “grading” their efforts in each respective area. Companies featured in the report, beyond those mentioned above, include Akamai, Amazon, IBM and Twitter, among others.

The Data Center Journal has briefly considered the different alternative energy sources (“Alternative Energy Sources Roundup”), and although each has some potential along with its own peculiar advantages, each also has a number of downsides. Coal and nuclear—the energy sources with the greatest ability (currently) to meet existing demand—are viewed most negatively by Greenpeace.

But not all companies can locate their data centers within range of a hydroelectric plant. For one, eventually the capacity of that plant will be maxed out, leaving other companies to rely on other sources (i.e., coal and nuclear). Furthermore, power used by a data center is power that can’t be used by another consumer, so the gain is not as clear as it may seem. No doubt, Greenpeace believes that as more data centers use renewable energy sources, public interest in those sources will expand and energy companies will build more infrastructure to support them. To some extent, this may be true, but alternative energy sources still lack the ability to meet demand on a large scale. Locally, for instance, a hydroelectric power plant might be great—but it can’t serve an entire nation or the world.

The Economic Problem

Energy does so many things—it transports us from one location to another, processes data to give us information on our computer screens, does household chores (e.g., laundry) and so much more. Demand for energy, therefore, will continue to increase, particularly if prices fall or even remain the same. Thus, the only way for alternative energy sources to make a dent in coal’s and nuclear’s dominance—and thereby appease Greenpeace—is for their prices to be comparable to or lower than those of coal and nuclear. Unless an alternative energy source can show some economic viability in this sense, the only alternative is increasing the price of coal and nuclear—and that’s easy to do if you just add enough regulations. No doubt, this is part of Greenpeace’s agenda. (And not all regulations are bad, nor does the government have no role in environmental matters—but governments are notorious for overregulation of just about everything.)

Ian Bitterlin, in a BCS article (“Are Greenpeace attacking the younger generation and their ‘dirty data’?”), notes that “what Greenpeace don’t seem to understand is that in the context of the growth rate in digital services…the growth in renewable energy capacity is falling far behind.” In other words, the demand for energy is outstripping renewable capacity, meaning that standard energy sources are the only option for a large portion of energy needs. Ultimately, then, Greenpeace’s problem is not so much with the data center companies’ energy diet, but the demand for services. Hence, Bitterlin asks whether Greenpeace isn’t simply alienating the younger generation that relies so heavily on Facebook and other digital services.

Data Centers Don’t Just Eat Energy

Yes, data centers consume a lot of energy, but they also empower users—both companies and individual consumers—in a number of ways that reduce energy consumption (or otherwise aid the environment) elsewhere. For instance, email (particularly when universally accessible through the cloud) reduces consumption of paper for written communication. Remote services enable workers to reduce their commuting time, lowering oil consumption. Online shopping means fewer miles spent traveling to stores. One could certainly find both good and bad aspects to these trends, but clearly, data center energy use is not simply an “adder” to existing energy consumption by other sectors. Bitterlin notes, “Then we could consider the lower-carbon enablement that data centers bring to our society—better communications, more education, less travel, smart-grid enablement, smart-buildings…even more effective democracy as we saw in the Arab Spring.”

Again, economics somewhat balances this change. Let’s say the Internet reduces miles traveled by workers and shoppers, thus reducing demand for oil. Lower demand means lower price, but that lower price might encourage, say, more-distant vacations, which bumps the price (and consumption) back up. But the energy-consumption fault lies with the consumers of IT services (Greenpeace is one such consumer) as much as (if not more so than) with companies that provide the services. So, Greenpeace’s attack does indeed amount to an attack on the broader IT culture.

Conclusions

Greater efficiency in the data center is great, but it’s not going to solve the problem of increasing demand. Indeed, a higher-efficiency service tends to cost less, meaning demand will grow to make up the difference (the Jevons paradox). The solution to the problem of runaway energy consumption by data centers is not simply a matter of improving efficiency or even relying more heavily on alternative energy—two items on Greenpeace’s wish list. Demand for services will probably continue expanding as long as there’s more energy at a relatively low price to power those services. In the meantime, the only solution may be to wait to see how energy supply pans out relative to price and demand.

Photo courtesy of HowardLake

Bank Robbery 2.0: Attacks in the Browser

Banks have invested heavily in the security of their systems and effectively encrypted the communication channels from the customer to the bank. They have also continued to improve the TAN procedure, having recently done away with printed TAN lists and introduced new procedures such as mobile TAN and flicker TAN. But in reality, cyber criminals can circumvent all these protection mechanisms by attacking the customer’s PC.

In the world of bank robbery 2.0, perpetrators do not attack the banks. They infect online banking customers’ computers with intelligent computer malware called banking Trojans. Visiting an infected website is all it takes to infect the computer with this specialized malware. Once it has stolen the access data, this malware can actively intervene in the payment process and divert legitimate transactions to other accounts without being detected.

How Does the Banking Fraud Work?

If the browser has been manipulated by a banking Trojan, data is still transferred from the computer to the bank in an encrypted form, but it is not the data that the user actually entered in the browser. If the bank customer tries to pay his rent from his infected PC, for example, the data he enters is visible in the Internet browser, but once the TAN is entered the money is unnoticeably directed to the criminal’s account.

Diagram: The terminal browser is the weak link in the online banking chain. The data is manipulated before being encrypted and the money ends up in the perpetrator’s account.

Most antivirus solutions do not detect new banking Trojans until it is too late, since they require a corresponding signature for protection. In one test, conventional protection programs only detected 12 percent of the malware strains immediately and 27 percent after 24 hours. This means that traditional security technologies found it almost impossible to protect computers fully against current banking Trojans.

The biggest issue with this situation is that the consumer is unaware of this fact. Nobody likes to talk about the threats of banking Trojans, because they are unable to offer a solution to the problem. Being aware, staying alert and working from an AV-protected PC within a safe network does not do the trick in this case. Even the best-educated IT security expert can fall victim to this malware, as it operates invisibly and requires no user involvement at all.

Owing to the lack of communication about banking Trojans, users remain blissfully unaware of the risk, even though the average damages per case are around $5,000. Consumers assume they are safe when they install security software on their computer. And no one, neither banks nor AV vendors, will tell them otherwise.

At InfoSecurity, G Data will demonstrate the world’s first solution that detects and blocks over 99.9% of all banking Trojans: BankGuard. This technology works in a completely signature-independent way. It is firmly integrated in the browser and can protect users against all known and unknown banking Trojans. Manipulations by this type of malware are detected instantly and stopped automatically.  BankGuard is compatible with all existing AV solutions and has been incorporated into the brand’s own consumer products since version 2012.

About the Author

Belgian Eddy Willems is Security Evangelist for G Data. He has been active in the field of IT security since 1989. In that period, he has worked for influential institutes, such as EICAR, of which he is a co-founder; several CERT associations; international police forces; and the organization behind the WildList, as well as for commercial companies, such as NOXS and Kaspersky Lab Benelux. In his position as global security officer and security evangelist at G Data, Eddy Willems forms the link between technical complexity and the user. He is responsible for the clear communication of G Data’s Security Labs towards the security community, press, distributors, resellers and end users, and he often speaks at international security conferences like Virus Bulletin, EICAR, InfoSecurity, AVAR, RSA and others.

About G Data Software AG

With headquarters in Bochum, Germany, G Data Software AG is an innovative and rapidly expanding software house that focuses on IT security solutions. A specialist in Internet security and a pioneer in the field of virus protection, the company was founded in Bochum in 1985. For over five years, no other European security software provider has won as many national and international tests and awards as often as G Data. The product range consists of security solutions for end customers and medium to large-sized enterprises. G Data security solutions are available in more than 90 countries around the world. You can find more information about the company and G Data security solutions at www.gdatasoftware.com.

G Data is exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2012, the number-one industry event in Europe, held on April 24–26, 2012, at the prestigious venue of Earl’s Court, London. The event provides an unrivaled free education program, with exhibitors showcasing new and emerging technologies and offering practical and professional expertise. For further information, visit www.infosec.co.uk.

High administrative costs due to account maintenance, password resets, inconsistent information, inflexible information technology (IT) environments, silos due to mergers and acquisitions, and aging IT infrastructures make this even more challenging for organizations. Together, these factors are propelling the adoption of privileged lifecycle access management solutions across all industries. Privileged access lifecycle management (PALM) is a technology architecture framework consisting of four continual stages running under a central automated platform:

• Access to privileged resources
• Control of privileged resources
• Monitoring of actions taken on privileged resources
• Remediation to revert changes made on privileged IT resources to a known good state.

Privileged Access Lifecycle Management

Access includes the process of centrally provisioning role-based time-bound credentials for privileged access to IT assets to facilitate administrative tasks. The process also includes automation for approval of access requests and auditing of access logs.

Control

Control includes the process of centrally managing role-based permissions for tasks that can be conducted by administrators once granted access to a privileged IT resource. The process also includes automation for approval of permission requests and auditing of administrative actions conducted on the system.

Monitor

Monitor includes audit management of logging, recording and overseeing user activities. This process also includes automated workflows for event and I/O log reviews and acknowledgements and centralized audit trails for streamlined audit support and heightened security awareness.

Remediation

Remediation includes the process of refining previously assigned permissions for access and/or control to meet security or compliance objectives, and the capability to centrally roll back system configuration to a previous known acceptable state if required. Automation of the privileged access management lifecycle includes a central unifying policy platform coupled with an event review engine that provides controls for and visibility into each stage of the lifecycle.

How to cost justify privileged access lifecycle management

• Security: privileged access is critical for smooth ongoing administration of IT assets. At the same time, it exposes an organization to security risks, especially insider threats.
• Compliance: privileged access to critical business systems, if not managed correctly, can introduce significant compliance risks. The ability to provide an audit trail across all stages of the privileged access lifecycle management is critical for compliance, and is often difficult to achieve in large complex heterogeneous IT environments.
• Reduced complexity: effective privileged access lifecycle management in large heterogeneous environments with multiple administrators, managers and auditors, can be an immensely challenging task.
• Heterogeneous coverage: an effective PALM solution supports across a broad range of platforms including Windows, UNIX, Linux, AS/400, Active Directory, databases, firewalls and routers/switches.

Beginning Steps Before Implementing PALM

1. Set Security as a Corporate Goal
   Enterprises may have trouble maintaining security because everyone is too busy trying to reach other goals. If you have problems maintaining security in your company, consider adding security as a goal for every level of management.
2. Provide or Enlist in Training as Required
   For security to work, everyone needs to know the basic rules. Once they know the rules, it doesn’t hurt to prompt them to follow those rules.
3. Ensure All Managers Understand Security
   It is especially important that all members of management understand the risks associated with unsecured systems. Otherwise, management choices may unwittingly jeopardize the company’s reputation, proprietary information and financial results.
4. Communicate to Management Clearly
   Too often, system administrators complain to their terminals instead of their supervisors. Other times, system administrators find that complaining to their supervisors is remarkably like complaining to their terminals. If you are a manager, make sure that your people have access to your time and attention. When security issues come up, it is important to pay attention. The first line of defense for your network is strong communication with the people behind your machines. If you are a system administrator, try to ensure that talking to your immediate manager fixes the problems you see from potential or realized misuse of privileges. If it doesn’t, you should be confident enough to reach higher in the management chains to alert for action.
5. Delineate Cross-Organizational Security Support
   If your company has a security group and a system administration group, the organization needs to clearly define their roles and responsibilities. For example, are the system administrators responsible for configuring the systems? Is the security group responsible for reporting non-compliance? If no one is officially responsible, nothing will get done. And accountability for resulting problems will many times be shouldered by the non-offending party.

About the Author

John Mutch is CEO of BeyondTrust.

BeyondTrust is exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2012, the number-one industry event in Europe, held on April 24–26, 2012, at the prestigious venue of Earl’s Court, London. The event provides an unrivaled free education program, with exhibitors showcasing new and emerging technologies and offering practical and professional expertise. For further information, visit www.infosec.co.uk.

Photo courtesy of Identicardimages

When looking for civil ID solutions, governments of emerging countries face two critical questions. First, how do you establish citizen identity for whole populations? Second, once identity is established, how do you ensure citizens requesting services are who they say they are, and are therefore entitled to access a service? Fingerprint biometrics has quickly become a key part of establishing and authenticating identity.

Biometrics and National Elections

For emerging countries, enrolling citizens to enforce a one-person, one-vote system is of supreme importance. Without this basic guarantee of fairness, election results are rejected more often than not, resulting in civil unrest. There are an increasing number of instances where fingerprint biometrics has had a transformational impact on the electoral process.

Fingerprint biometrics has had a positive impact on the Nigerian election process. Though Nigeria became a democracy through a presidential election in 1999, balloting remained challenged by voting irregularities. Voter registration lists, developed over the last decade, were full of names of dead and fictitious people. Precincts that had few voters sometimes were reporting a 100 percent turnout in highly-contested local elections. To avoid a repeat, in the weeks and months leading up to Nigeria’s April 2011 elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conducted a program to register all eligible citizens in Africa’s most populous country.

To do so, INEC put out a bid for 132,000 Direct Data Capture (DDC) machines using fingerprint sensors to support voter registration. With the solutions in place, INEC of Nigeria embarked on an ambitious voter registration program. On January 15, 2011, INEC began registering all of its voters for the April general election, making it the first voter registration initiative of this scale and sophistication. All told, 73 million voters across the 36 states and Abuja were successfully registered in time for the election, and the election was deemed a success by previously critical independent observers. Key to this effort was establishing and verifying identity, quickly and simply, through fingerprint biometrics.

Setting the Stage for the Future of Nations

Biometrics is a portable identity for citizens that can be reused in many other programs in both the public and private sectors. Delivering services such as entitlements, banking and voting brings points-of-service access to rural populations in a cost-effective, reliable and secure way. Many countries are now fingerprinting their entire population in anticipation of using biometric databases for a wide range of civil and commercial programs.

DigitalPersona is exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2012, the number-one industry event in Europe, held on April 24–26, 2012, at the prestigious venue of Earl’s Court, London. The event provides an unrivaled free education program, with exhibitors showcasing new and emerging technologies and offering practical and professional expertise. For further information, visit www.infosec.co.uk.

About the Author

Chris Trytten is Director, Developer Product Marketing at DigitalPersona, Inc.

About DigitalPersona

DigitalPersona, Inc., is a global provider of strong authentication and access management solutions that close the gap between people and security for enterprises, government agencies and commercial embedded-solution developers. DigitalPersona’s authentication and access management software is shipped by computer manufacturers on millions of notebooks and desktop computers per year; its cloud- and Active Directory–managed solutions for multi-factor/strong authentication, single sign-on (SSO) password management and emergency access recovery simplify compliance and cut IT costs. The company’s fingerprint biometrics technology helps organizations prevent fraud and increase accountability; it is incorporated into multiple national voting systems and almost all brands of biometrically-enabled point-of-sale (POS) stations, as well as many commercial applications in the retail, healthcare and financial industries. For more information, contact DigitalPersona, Inc., at: +1 650.474.4000, or visit www.digitalpersona.com.

Photo courtesy of blvesboy

How Are Midsized Businesses Selecting New Advanced Backup and Recovery Solutions?

In today’s economy, companies are stepping back to re-evaluate the way their backup system should function in order to have the shortest backup window, fastest restores and most cost-effective backup infrastructure as data grows. Although businesses have relied on tape for some part of their backup and disaster recovery process, since it has been a less expensive medium, slow backups and restores and tape backup failures remain problematic.

As the cost of disk has decreased and some disk backup with deduplication systems now match the price of new tape libraries, the move to disk backup is accelerating. Some of the trends include the following:

• As companies look to replace legacy tape libraries, they are taking the opportunity to evaluate their entire backup and recovery processes.
• Adoption of disk-based recovery solutions has grown quickly. Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) is estimated to be the backup approach for 65% of organizations today. A recent poll of enterprise storage professionals showed 44% were currently using or planning to use target-side disk backup appliances in the next 12 months.
• Although companies often deferred to their primary storage vendor, new capabilities available in best-of-breed solutions offer a wider variety of options for IT managers to choose from.
• Server virtualization has triggered a move to upgrade and modernize backup infrastructures, including the move to disk-based backup with deduplication.

What Can IT Departments Do Now?

On the basis of what a number of IT departments have done, here are some suggestions:

• Develop a comprehensive data backup and recovery plan, including assumptions on data growth anticipated three years ahead, and test any backup and DR systems that rely on tape.
• Develop a business impact analysis and/or risk assessment to understand the cost of downtime (e.g., lost sales, employee productivity and customer loyalty), determine the acceptable level of downtime and the risk of data loss. Events like power outages or IT system failures should be considered along with natural disasters.
• Consider or deploy technological advancements in data backup products, including server virtualization backup improvements, instant VM recovery, data deduplication and WAN-efficient replication of deduplicated backup data instead of physically transporting tape off-site and back for recovery.
• Assess the economics of backup by looking at the total cost of ownership and cost of expanding capacity as data grows.

Gartner’s suggestion of implementing data reduction technologies merits further discussion. Gartner described deduplication as having become “table stakes” in the data backup and recovery market. “The value of data reduction technologies, such as deduplication, cannot be understated. Deduplication materially changes the economics of disk-based backup and recovery approaches by reducing data, resulting in significantly lower disk requirements and cost…data reduction, such as compression and deduplication, is a ‘must have’ capability for backup solutions.”

Marching Forward

The data backup and recovery market is indeed in a state of modernization that favors newer, innovative solutions over installed incumbent providers of backup applications or storage systems. The requirements for faster backups, permanently short backup windows over time, faster file-level and VM restores, reduced complexity to manage virtual server backups, and greater reliability—all largely driven by data growth and technological change—will remain a compelling force. The willingness of IT departments to invest in new data backup capabilities such as disk backup with deduplication will play a key role in helping businesses eliminate the risks and problems associated with legacy backup infrastructures that still rely in some way on tape.

About the Author

Bill Hobbib is Vice President of Marketing for ExaGrid Systems, the leader in cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with data deduplication.