Fujitsu Australia touts storage audit benefits
Fujitsu Australia touts storage audit benefits
An examination of distributed storage trends among Australian businesses has shown that large organisations can have data duplication rates as high as 32 percent within their primary storage systems – a problem that Fujitsu Australia is looking to help enterprises address with its new data assessment services.
Fujitsu has also found that much of the data stored by enterprises has been poorly categorised, with many enterprises finding that over half the information housed within costly online storage has not been accessed for 12 months or more. Much of this data can be moved to less expensive near-line storage, while a lesser proportion could be moved to cheaper still archive storage.
James Jefferd, principal consultant, enterprise systems at Fujitsu, says many of these problems can be addressed through a comprehensive audit of storage requirements and processes, adding that stronger storage management can slash data management costs for many large corporate clients.
"The recent explosive growth in stored data is unsustainable in the long term. Fujitsu worked with one client where 30 percent of available storage was consumed by just 10 users in a 200-person organisation. Many companies end up storing gigabytes worth of data that is never used and adds no value. Good storage practice is as much a management issue as it is a technical challenge."
Many CIOs in large enterprises now find themselves spending a large amount of their IT budget managing storage systems and maintaining data space for their enterprises. Fujitsu's experience shows that these resource overheads can be significantly decreased through proper analysis of storage utilisation and requirements.
Using a combination of purpose-built software tools and storage audit expertise, Fujitsu consultants can help organisations address data maintenance issues and cut storage costs. Fujitsu achieves results for its clients through comprehensive auditing and analysis of storage needs; assistance in defining efficient storage management policies; development of systems to implement and maintain storage policies; and enhancing IT managers' ability to control storage usage.
"We need to understand how the enterprise creates and consumes its data, identify patterns of usage, then implement a process that empowers IT managers - as well as the users themselves - to identify and address wasteful storage practices," says Jefferd.
For instance, diagnostics may show a rapid build-up of data as a result of a particular staff member downloading music files, video clips or large images for private use. Not only does this add to corporate storage costs and raise potential legal problems, it slows down backup and restoration operations for business documents that may be urgently required.
"Fujitsu can implement solutions using business rules to automatically delete undesirable or redundant content or transfer dated material to another level of storage where instant access is not essential. This speeds overall system performance, frees up vital resources and enables IT managers to concentrate on the job of providing efficient service to the business," says Jefferd.
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