Dell’s Equallogic Solutions help CIOs cut storage costs

"Today CIO's don't want to invest in new technologies, rather they want to maximize benefit from the existing technologies; It is time for a reality check to see if we are getting the most out of our investments, " believes Alvin Kho, Chief Consultant, Dell APJ. Kho is on a three day visit to India to launch the SAN 2.0 initiative through a series of meetings with India CIOs to understand the storage needs of enterprises in these recessionary times.

Commenting that India has a very mature outlook to virtualization, Kho said that his interaction with India CIOs revealed that the top priority for most is to cut costs and yet achieve maximum storage flexibility and scalability. The latest trends emerging in the storage sector be it de-duplication, storage visualization or data archival, all focus on allowing enterprises manage storage complexity issues better and reduce costs associated with managing old data while helping them take backups using less bandwidth.

Dell's Equallogic

Dell's Equallogic solution with its modular approach answers to a lot of the chief concerns of CIOs. It helps CIOs manage investments and resources more intelligently through a three tier strategy that revolves around replacement cycle, storage consolidation and open architecture. It tries to demystify a lot of ambiguity around the process of de-duplication. "De-duplication allows you to take out and back up your old data out of your system to create space for more. But there is not a lot of ambiguity around how this works; with Equallogic we've tried to change that." With Equallogic, Dell has tried to put both the hardware and software piece together in one unit. "You just need to plug it into your system and through the flexible setup procedures, the process is complete in half an hour."

Security issues

Security plays a dominant role in all storage processes.  To address the growing concern over security Dell has a unique application on Equlallogic, which allows you to do an independent auto check every time any resource is extracted from the system, whether the external application data structure is conducting de-duplication process or not. Kho believes that security should be built within the storage system, and should not just be an outside function. "The idea behind having an auto security check is to reduce risk of human error."

Dell's also claims to be the only vendors in the market to have built a self learning methodology in their storage solutions. "In the traditional way any new technological implementation would typically require you to hire a lot of people and you eventually run into change management headaches," says Kho. Dell's Equallogic has an intelligent self learning technology that allows you to learn-as-you-use, and helps save on time and money.

Equallogic's modular approach had found resonance with Indian CIOs spread across a wide spectrum. "In these times when there is a cost crunch, CIOs want to buy on need basis. This way they buy whatever required pieces as and when they want instead of the earlier approach where they had to buy the whole thing lot at one go."