Products staying out of the cloud

Photo / Herald on Sunday

While cloud computing and the outsourcing of data storage is taking off, an IT developer hopes to lure local businesses with traditional, on-site data management.

Data storage providers EMC announced more than 40 new products yesterday and EMC New Zealand chief technology officer Arron Patterson said their VNXe system is well suited to the local market, particularly small businesses.

This is the first EMC product aimed at firms with a small number of employees and the benefit of their product is that it delivers a high level of performance but is extremely easy to use, Patterson said.

"It's the first platform, in this end of the world, that's designed to be built and administered by an IT generalist [someone without storage expertise]," he said.

"When the user goes to it and says they want to set up a new email exchange server, with 25 users, that needs to be a terabyte in size, the machine knows which is the best way to configure it to meet that kind of workload."

Patterson denied that EMC's new on-premises products were moving against the market's demand for cloud computing, where network and data storage is managed on an external server by a third party rather than a business itself.

"In New Zealand we're constrained on the telecommunication side of things by bandwidth and performance, so not all workloads will work well out of a cloud to start off with.

"A lot of those issues are being solved, but for right now people tend to keep their [sensitive data] in the basket close to them and manage it in a traditional way," Patterson said.

Also included in the bundle of releases was a product for customers with high data needs such as banks and the public sector.

However EMC has no intention of vying for Government's ICT contracts now at tender.

Patterson said EMC was staying away from the tender to avoid stepping on the toes of their local partners.

"We don't see it as an area where we want to compete with our partners and try to deal directly with the Government," he said.