Reducing risks in uncertain times | Bangkok Post: tech

DISASTER RECOVERY

Recognising the potential demand for enterprise spending in IT to reduce overall costs and risks in this uncertain political climate, EMC is pushing backup disaster recovery solutions, private clouds and unified storage to extend its footprint beyond core storage.

Nathakorn Potejanasaja, country manager, EMC Thailand, the leading information infrastructure technology company, said the organisation will put more emphasis on enterprise spending in high-growth areas that mainly use technology to reduce costs and risks such as those which affected the corporate community during this year's anti-government protests.

The recent political turmoil is driving awareness of and spending on backup disaster recovery systems that attract enterprise and government agencies.

Data Domain Global Deduplication Array is one of EMC's flagship backup recovery products, with the fastest inline de-duplication storage system for enterprise. It offers inline global de-duplication and a global namespace for all data stored in the dual controller system.

With throughput of up to 12.8 terabytes per hour, this will help customers protect more data in shorter times. EMC expects that more enterprises will assess integration between backup software and de-duplication storage to maximise performance and data-reduction results while consolidating administrative tasks.

Private cloud is another growth area because it helps enterprises to better manage data, which is exploding worldwide with growth from 0.8 zettabytes in 2009 to an expected 35.2ZB by 2020. It should also aid better management of IT infrastructures, with an average 72 percent of corporate IT budget going towards system maintenance.

Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology can match the right data with the right storage type, helping customers to reduce capacity and power by 30 percent, while its VPLEX advanced Virtual Storage technology allows organisations to non-disruptively move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information over thousands of miles, easily shift IT operations out of the way of regional disasters, and dynamically balance workloads.

The technology enabling information access and movement free from the constraints of physical storage. "We are seeing lots of interest in implementing private clouds in the banking, manufacturing and especially telecom sectors, which are planning to offer IT as a service to their customers when the 3G network rolls put," said Nathakorn.

Meanwhile, in this September, EMC plans to launch its latest move in Unified Storage to increase the total cost of ownership by 30 percent and manage capacity efficiency by up to 50 percent.

"The IT industry is in the midst of transformation to cloud computing and EMC has broadened its product portfolio and solutions to cover customers' needs beyond its traditional business in core storage covering security, information intelligence, data center management and backup recovery systems," said the country manager.

Nathakorn continued that even in the uncertain political atmosphere of the first six months of this year, the company still grew 60 percent year-on-year due to spending on storage to manage increasing data. This is why EMC has boosted its share in the overall external storage market in Thailand in then first quarter by 13.28 percent, with mid-range storage gains of 19.18 percent and high-end storage gains 54.63 percent.

However, the company continues to work closely with partners to leverage their opportunity to selling more new EMC solutions adding on existing customers by training technology knowledge and recruit new specialised solution partners to expand new customer bases.

Pongsak Junpoonsub, new channel partner manager at EMC, added that the company will find more partners who can cover upcountry regions, as less than 10 percent of EMC's revenue comes from the provinces.

Moreover, the company plans to collaborate more with Dell and CDG Microsystems to promote DataDomain.

"We will push our partners to cross-sell this solution and gain incremental business to deliver robust end-to-end solutions to its customers," Pongsak said.