New venture offers rental data storage

By ADAM GIFFORD

Systems integrator gen-i has teamed with Vector's fibre network subsidiary Tangent to offer an outsourced storage service.

Firms can rent storage from gen-i on a per gigabyte a month basis.

While the storage service provider (SSP) industry has been picking up speed overseas in the past year, New Zealand has been slow to embrace the concept.

Stephen Osborn, gen-i's data outsourcing and storage services manager, said that was because the cost of bandwidth had been too high to make such a service viable.

Tangent uses the optical fibre Vector laid to assist the management of its Auckland powerlines network. For customers who need access to the service from outside Auckland, gen-i has a services agreement with Clear Communications.

Mr Osborn has spent most of the past year researching SSP operations in the United States and Europe.

Gen-i is investing $10 million over three years in the service, but expects to break even within a year. It has half a terabyte of storage on Network Appliance servers housed at Tangent's data centres in Newmarket.

Network Appliance's network attached storage (NAS) model uses ethernet connections, rather than the significantly more expensive fibre channel switches needed to create a storage area network (SAN).

Using the network company's fibres, gen-i extends its client's internal network on to a virtual private network into the data centre running at speeds equal to or exceeding the original network.

Mr Osborn said the architecture was modelled on that developed by the biggest global SSP, Storage Networks, which also uses Network Appliance.

He said any organisation with a growing IT infrastructure should consider outsourcing data storage.

"The volumes of data being created by e-business and the internet are actually crippling organisations."

Analysts estimate companies can expect data storage growth of 70 per cent a year.

"The demand for SSPs is typically created by people with lots of data they can't do anything with because they can't manage it, it's not being archived or proactively managed so they have to keep buying more disk.

"A better solution is to put a good storage policy in place and then outsource it."

He said most organisations accessed only 40 per cent of their data regularly; the rest was an unmanaged nightmare affecting general administration like backing up, restoring and archiving.

The gen-i SSP is aimed at medium-to-large companies with data-intensive requirements.

Companies can rent or buy storage, with gen-i charging for direct storage costs, communications charges, and professional services such as Enterprise Management Services (EMS), archiving, failover, and disaster recovery.

Basic storage, including rapid recovery and virus checking of data, costs $80 a gigabyte a month, with minimum storage of 50Gb for NT systems and 100Gb for Unix.

Mr Osborn said gen-i had one customer and was in advanced discussions with others.