Making space

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The simplification of storage will be on agendas. - Mohamed Halawa, enterprise marketing manager, Dell.

Standards are equally important, Harrison points out, if enterprises want to reduce the risk of being left behind in the dark. "The overall rationale for following the standard is that it lowers the risk of being left out on your own. I think standards are definitely a good thing and what we are seeing is that there less appetite for being at the leading edge so most people are following the herd and staying with the majority," explains Harrison.

"I know for a fact that the governments and finance sectors especially are treating these compliance measures with a great deal of importance. In terms of compliance I am 100% sure that our customers are looking more and more into being compliant with international standards," says Mohamed Halawa, enterprise marketing manager, Dell.

While regulation and compliance are relatively new to the region, the iSCSI protocol has been around for a while and perceptions regarding its use and uptake remain mixed.

"iSCSI is an agreed, standardised way of communicating between servers and storage. In terms of what it does, the fact that it is there and is defined as a standard gives people options. I think this will be the industry standard because going down that route gives you 30% better value than sticking with a single vendor," predicts Harrison.

Khalil is less optimistic about the future for iSCSI. "It as initially was promoted as a poor man's SAN technology, but it has not been successful in penetrating datacentres where fibre channel remains the dominant technology. We don't expect iSCSI to have dramatic impact on datacentres moving forward due to its limited deployment in mission critical environments," he says.

Money makes the data go round

Storage like everything else costs money and given the increase in data coupled with the decline in budget spending on storage is an area that could likely be impacted.

"I think the key feedback we are receiving is the budget constraints. We see that these constraints are somewhat related to the resources driving new projects and so it limits customers across all verticals at the moment," said Steinecker of Dell.

Halawa explains that what he is hearing from CIOs and IT managers is that it is not a question of either not spending or decreasing spending, but in exercising caution. He is quick to point out that many customers do choose to invest in new storage solutions but only once they have done an exhaustive inventory of their requirements and budget.

Aboukhater believes that financial considerations now put more power in the hands of the customers. "If you are a company with vision and long term plans then I think now is the best time to go for these solutions because at this point the customer is king and you can get whatever you want. Vendors are hungry for the business and it's definitely a buyer's market at the moment," advises Aboukhater.

Due to the fact that data by its very nature continues to grow storage remains a key investment and so Khalil explains that it is simply not just a discretionary expense.

"Despite the economic slow down, enterprises continue to store data. Enterprises will cut, but not eliminate, their storage expenses at a lower pace than they cut other technology area. Brocade expects that demand for storage will slow down slightly during the global recession, but will be one of the first areas to recover," says Khalil.

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