06 November 2008
StorTech Technology Services, a leading Sun Microsystems partner, today announced a new portfolio of solutions for the virtualised enterprise. StorTech is growing its brand by going beyond storage to offer an end-to-end solution that will deploy virtualised enterprise technologies to maximize data centre resource utilization.
StorTech CEO Tim Knowles says becoming a Sun Microsystems’ end-to-end partner provides the company access to the best virtualised enterprise technology solutions.
“Today’s CIOs are under enormous pressure to extract more value from their existing infrastructure to meet ever increasing demand for systems capacity, without increasing their capital expenditure,” says Knowles.
“Virtualisation is the hot technology trend of the moment as it enables CIOs to address these challenges. Virtualisation technologies have come of age and are providing CIOs with a means of extracting maximum value from existing infrastructure.
“End-to-end virtualisation provides significant benefits as virtualised enterprises are much more agile and able to respond speedily to opportunities and competitors’ moves in the market anywhere, any time and on any device.”
Knowles says that currently average server utilization levels are no more than 28% of capacity. Virtualisation enables companies to increase return on investment (ROI) by locating resources on fewer servers by taking advantage of all available capacity. Furthermore, using dynamic resource configuration, new applications can be rapidly launched as there is a virtualised pool of resources to draw on.
Server maintenance and administration can be achieved with zero disruption as users can be dynamically moved from one server to another without their knowledge.
Storage managers can maximise their budget expenditure to fit with their storage requirements as storage can be provisioned as required. Life cycle management (ILM) tools allow virtualised pools of data to be dynamically transferred within storage tiers, unknown to the actual users. Data can then be moved to more expensive higher performing tiers as and when required.
Disaster recovery planning is simplified as data can easily be transferred to another virtual environment without provision of additional servers.
Backing up data to a virtual tape environment uses less storage space and is non-disruptive as data is written to multiple streams. Writing to a virtual environment ensures that backups are 100% successful, run faster, and with de-duplication technology one can get at least 15:1 compression on backups.
In the virtualised desktop environment users get a terminal view of their data and software that can be accessed on any machine, anywhere and anytime. Significant cost savings are derived because one doesn’t have to upgrade software on individual laptops or desk tops as the software resides on the server.
“Adopting virtualised enterprise strategies is good for the environment,” says Knowles. “Improved asset utilization frees up server capacity, requiring less hardware and allowing you to use less energy for the same tasks and to be more energy efficient.”
StorTech will be delivering data centre solutions based on Sun Microsystems’ Virtualised Enterprise technology in conjunction with partner Symantec, a leader in the data security, protection and back up environment. It also partners with VMWare in the Microsoft operating environment.
Email has become mission critical in all organizations and archiving is critical in terms of corporate governance and a compliance point of view. One of Symantec’s strengths is its archiving email abilities. Emails are centrally archived into a virtually “bottomless mailbox”.
“With approximately 60% of all South African litigation relying on email evidence it is imperative that emails are a secured and backed up appropriately,” says Knowles.
“We are very excited by our expanded offering and see a great future for StorTech as an end-to-end virtualised enterprise solutions supplier,” concludes Knowles.