Oracle OpenWorld Blog

Exerpt from the official daily newspaper from Oracle Magazine and Profit.By Joe Shepter.

Kicking off his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld on Monday, Tom Georgens, president and chief operating officer of NetApp, observed that storage is the biggest consumer of today’s IT dollars. He used the balance of his presentation to explain how companies can reduce their time to market and improve their top lines by taking advantage of the latest advances in storage technology.

Georgens began with a summary of current storage challenges. He noted that more data is being saved than ever before, while companies have expanded the categories of data they consider mission-critical.

Not surprisingly, IT managers are encountering constraints due to the the size of their data centers and the cost of running them efficiently. In addition, many corporations such as Oracle are working to green their operations and reduce the electricity and cooling costs associated with storage.

“As daunting as those tasks look,” said Georgens, “there are technologies to change and improve our ability to deal with [them].”

To prove his point, Georgens outlined four major advances in storage technology. The first was thin provisioning, which allows companies to partially allocate storage to meet initial requirements while pooling the rest to dole out according to the needs of various applications. The second, deduplication, offers another way to reduce storage requirements.

Next on the list was thin cloning, which allows companies to create a logical copy of data without duplicating the physical space. Georgens also discussed double-parity RAID, a methodology that protects against multiple storage drive failures. Together, these solutions can add up to big savings. As Georgens put it, “The cheapest storage to manage and cheapest storage to support is the storage you don’t have to buy.”

Find more stories in the Oracle OpenWorld Daily.