The Hindu Business Line : Storage spending shifting to software

If you thought that adventure sports and storage don't fit, rethink the combination. Hewlett Packard's conference held recently at muggy Malaysia had decision makers from all over Asia-Pacific discussing Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) while making up their minds about whether to go wake boarding or canoeing later in the evening.

ILM is the process of capturing, analysing, managing and finding information from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted.

According to Mr Graham Penn, Director, Storage Research, Asia-Pacific, IDC Australia, less than a third of APAC companies are acquainted with the ILM concept. While it has been talked about for years, it has taken its time to mature in the hardware-oriented storage domain. Finally it seems to be ready with players such as EMC, IBM and HP working hard on various aspects of ILM such as data indexing, information capture and database archival.

Currently, the trend is to just add hardware (servers and storage units) on an ad-hoc basis. With space becoming a premium, companies will soon realise the need for optimising and managing information across siloes of databases and servers using software. By 2009, storage spending will be more on software (such as ILM) than hardware, said Mr Penn.

With recent acquisitions of AppIQ and OuterBay, HP is steadily progressing towards a complete end-to-end ILM offering. The company is also expanding it throughout its other products (such as the printing division) and services, said Mr Frank Harbist, Vice President & General Manager, Storage Software Division, Network Storage Solutions, HP. The company expects service to be the differentiating factor in the ILM scene.