Storage as a telco business enabler

Malaysian Business, Sep 16, 2008 by Cynthia Ann Peterson

THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS sector in the country is expected to generate revenue of US$7.5 billion this year, and estimated to grow to US$8.2 billion in 2010 according to IDC research. The industry is highly competitive with players jostling to win new customers as well as increase their wallet share of both consumers and enterprise customers. The ability to rollout new or innovative services is highly dependent on technology while keeping spending in check.

"The concepts of convergence, compliance, customers and cost are talking points relevant to telcos. We have a strong presence in the segment across Asean,' says Ravi Rajendran, general manager, Asean, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). The company recently organised its HDS Asean Telco Summit in Hanoi, Vietnam bringing together leading regional operators to discuss industry challenges.

Telcos need to continually innovate to stay in business as a competitive advantage is one of the keys to retaining and enlarging the customer base.

HDS says its Services Oriented Storage Solutions (SOSS) strategy can contribute to profitability and drive innovation by providing business value.

`SOSS helps align IT with business and companies can move away from silo-based approaches which are inefficient and costly. SOSS enables consolidation on a common platform and reuse of resources. For every 12 terabytes of installed and usable disk capacity, there is a US$1 million net operational expenditure reduction potential,' says Vivekanand Venogopal, director, products and solutions marketing, Asia Pacific, HDS.

Waste and outage time reduction and management labour effort can also be reduced between 15% and 25%. SOSS's business-centric framework aligns IT storage resources to meet changing business requirements on a dynamic, flexible platform of integrated storage services. Businesses of all sizes need to get a good idea of what their storage utilisation and needs really are as only 20% to 30% is typically utilised. Over-provisioning for certain applications contributes towards the wastage, and applications need to be aligned to business goals with flexible service level agreements implemented. A storage platform that can be flexible and robust is necessary to achieve this.

CIOs face issues such as accelerating storage growth with costs also going up, siloed infrastructure, low utilisation and spending to maintain old systems. They will need to address these to take advantage of the opportunities for growth in the telco segment over the next five years.

According to Sandra Ng, group vice president, Asia/Pacific Communications, Peripherals and Services Research, IDC, converged ICT services, cloud and complex computing, multimedia services and bundled offerings are among the areas showing growth potential.

The challenges they face are customer segmentation and satisfaction, content delivery and protection and integrated billing. When it comes to focusing on either the consumer or business segments, telcos should be wary of putting too much emphasis on one as there will be an issue when the market changes. Telcos need to balance market perception and mindshare for future growth prospects.

VIRTUALISATION

Virtualisation is another challenge telcos face and in a heterogeneous storage environment adding virtualisation can simplify management as one tool can be used to provision storage. Consolidation, enhancement of business continuity, utilisation increase, lower opex and decreasing complexity are among the catalogue of benefits a business can expect to gain from storage virtualisation.

Data mobility across different application tiers has to be done in a non-disruptive way to maintain smooth operations.

According to Adrian Deluca, director, storage management & data protection solutions, Asia Pacific, HDS, data can migrate seamlessly with policy-based and content aware automation. Server and storage virtualisation has proven to deliver savings if there is an understanding of server and storage utilisation among other issues.