Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
Last week Apple made its seminal announcement of the iPhone. We observed elsewhere that the iPhone is likely to have a significant effect on how users conceive important classes of enterprise applications (e.g., the availability of a browser pushes the need for high quality Web services). We also observed that the administration of those devices will be closely tied to security concerns.
However, we see a second domain where enterprises will have to clearly articulate their IT infrastructure strategies for accommodating handheld computing devices with built-in phones like the iPhone: storage solutions.
In the last few years large segments of the user, business, and supplier triumvirate have recognized an oncoming transition in how storage is conceptualized, purchased, implemented and administered. These groups have had different agendas, which often created confusion over the roadmaps and even the objectives for storage. However, ultimately all parties agreed that sound storage strategies focus on four key issues:
- Gaining greater control over the rate of growth and price of storage,
- Ensuring that storage fully supports business requirements for quality and compliance,
- Supporting solid and executable disaster recovery programs,
- Providing simple and effective backup/restore capabilities.
We see the iPhone as an important catalyst for cutting through the confusion regarding how to pursue these important storage deployment objectives. By its nature, a very powerful mobile device with large amounts of permanent storage like the iPhone fuels the need to gain greater influence if not outright control over how data is moved through the organization from a storage standpoint.
While we don't see any hardware silver bullets (e.g., homogeneous three-tiered storage solutions), we do see the iPhone fueling the need to invest in practices like information management, technologies like data deduplication and storage virtualization, and business relationships to provide such external services as network-ready hosting of storage for caching and storage delivery.
Action Item: The effects of the iPhone and later devices will take years to mature. Near term, however, storage professionals should factor their potential effects into current architectural decisions both to avoid introducing obsolescence into current investments and help sell the need for high-quality storage capabilities to the business.
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