Understand your business needs Internet solution is a corporate ISP that falls in the category of next generation service providers, connecting businesses with multiple branches. The company is a wholly owned division of Dimension Data Middle East and Africa, itself a subsidiary of Dimension Data, a global systems integrator. Internet Solutions offer connectivity – linking organisations internally and externally, people, media, access and device on a person-to-person communication model. The company also offers cloud and carrier services. The company maintains its own tier one international network and its own network nodes in North America, Europe and Asia, where it interconnects with the foremost Internet backbone providers. In Africa, the company’s international bandwidth lands at multiple points. The company has more than 7000 square metres of data centre space in South Africa and small and growing data centres in East and West Africa and in Europe. Loren Bosch, CEO Internet Solutions shares his forecast on the key trends within the storage industry. An increase in virtualized storage Storage virtualization is the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage at any layer of the software and hardware stack. A virtualized storage system can be host based software virtualization – whereby you can mirror your drives through software if you have a workstation or two. A hardware based virtualized system is where you have an onboard raid controller in the server that allows mirroring of drives. According to Loren, the integration between server and storage virtualization will become closer, and there will be an increase in server, storage and network infrastructure. Virtual storage will indeed form the platform for the adoption of cloud storage. Loren cites several challenges that virtualization brings about, hence the slow intake of this service in East Africa. The one major challenge to storage is that many CIOs are shy of hosting their sensitive data outside their enterprises. Storage virtualization is also an expensive venture to undertake individually as a company. This trend will grow with the growing appetite for private network that has accelerated over the past two years. Vendors are now offering integrated cloud stacks which provide pre-packaged cloud building blocks ready for use. Such solutions can help small to mid-sized enterprises implement private clouds easily as they provide infrastructure as a service – instant hardware and software solutions that provide virtual machines, virtual disks and virtual networks.
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP
Loren Bosch, CEO, Internet solutions
Wide acceptance of storage-as-a-service Loren predicts that there will be a much broader scale of review and adoption of data storage solutions. Already, there is a growing push away from companies maintaining their data. This has partly been driven by the legacy equipment and legacy environment coming from some sectors of the economy, especially the financial sector. Storage as a service is being driven by the need for data backup and data recovery. Businesses are looking for the minimal loss in terms of recovery time, money and data loss. From the vendor point of view, storage as a service is taking the main business focus in the solutions being offered to companies.
Choosing a storage partner According to Loren, CIOs need to spend more time understanding what their requirements are than shopping for a storage product or service provider. “Products originate around a specific environment and need, and they grow on that. If a business understands their requirements, be it accessibility, recovery time and so on, a lot of options are available,” he says. Businesses can have requirements ranging from basic solution requirements, to ERP enterprises and various layers of need. It is hard for CIOs to justify the spending to all solutions. This, according to Loren, has created the push towards software as a service whereby a targeted solution is stored at a central location where all softwares are rented. Infrastructure-as-a-service is also riding on this push. The data storage space, variable space, software as a service space has so many options and it is a very flexible environment. Understanding a need helps companies spend less on what they don’t need.
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