Control lab to relax storage anxiety
Control lab to relax storage anxiety
A new lab has been unveiled today by Data #3 to help businesses test the suitability of storage solutions before they integrate them fully into their system infrastructure, saving on pain, risk and uncertainty.
As the climate keeps changing over the storage landscape, and businesses desperately seek a variety of solutions to control data in the short term, mid-term and long-term, clouds are beginning to appear, blocking visibility over the best options.
The TotalStorage Solution Centre (TSSC), unveiled today, aims to provide an environment where every kind of storage device can be tried and tested alone or integrated with a number of other solutions before products are bought.
The data centre lab is based in North Sydney, and can be used to test NAS, SAN, clusters, virtualisation software, fibre channels iSCIs and many more storage hardware and software devices and solutions.
The centre has been released in conjunction with business partner IBM. Data #3 has invested around AUD$1 million dollars over three years, which includes IBM supplied TotalStorage hardware and software, storage specialists to manage the centre and ongoing maintenance costs.
John Grant, managing director of Data #3 commented on the importance of the centre. "Data #3 has made a significant investment in establishing the first Australian TSSC in Sydney. This is the only storage centre of its kind in Australia that is based on the combined expertise and resources of two technology leaders and is testament to the expertise Data #3 has built up in the storage area.
"The TSSC will provide enormous benefits for businesses wanting a low risk approach to utilising the latest storage technologies. Additionally, the storage specialists managing the TSSC will assist with the transfer and development of knowledge to customers in emerging areas such as storage virtualisation."
The TSSC concept has already been deployed in 140 different places around the world over the last three years. Brian Hamel, the vice president of IBM storage for the Asia Pacific, said that the time is right only now to introduce this concept into Australia because of the recent wave of importance over storage and the plethora of new solutions that have come into the market to manage that data.
He believes that people need this system now to simplify this new urgency to manage storage. "How to manage storage infrastructure has become a key issue for our client's IT departments. IBM's storage software family is about simplifying that infrastructure and helping clients deal with the high cost and complexity of data management.
"It effectively offers customers a dramatic new way to visualise and ultimately virtualise their entire corporate information assets while improving storage capacity utilisation, administrator productivity, and application availability.
"A recent customer study by IBM suggested business with mid-size to large SANs could save, on average, more than half a million dollars in the first year through improved disk utilisation and administrator productivity, as well as several million dollars in lost storage-related opportunity costs by improving application availability."
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