Storage Q&A: Advent One

Which storage solutions do you deploy?

We focus exclusively on IBM storage solutions: DS8000, SAN Volume Controller, XIV, and Storwize V7000, V5000. Also, storage management suites such as Tivoli and the Tivoli Productivity Centre. We're also a reseller for IBM SoftLayer.

When did your company first get involved in storage?

Storage has been part of our solutions for 15 years since we started

Which are your company’s storage credentials?

We have 25-30 technical storage certifications. IBM’s System Storage specialty and System Storage Elite specialty programs recognise those partners with the best capabilities and we’re one of only about two resellers in Australia with the mark.

Tell us about your distributors and distribution strategy?

IBM has just moved to a distribution-only model, so we use Avnet and sometimes Ingram Micro.

What cool or interesting recent storage technology is occupying your thoughts?

Flash: it has  revolutionised storage. It’s been a big driver for our business in the past 12 months. We’ve seen clients solve difficult problems relatively inexpensively. Then there's Actifio, a storage-virtualisation technology that manages copy data, backup and replication. It allows you to not consume disk with every copy of a dataset and allows everyone to work off the same copy. If they’re making changes, only the deltas are stored. 

Can you tell us about a recent storage deployment you have done?

We have large, ASX-listed clients that had to generate weekly sales report from a database cube as a massive batch job on a Sunday night, and it would take until 3pm the next day to run. They were throwing more compute at it to get it to run faster. We put in a flash solution that moved the workload off spinning disc, and the reports were available at 7am on Monday. 

What is driving customers’ storage projects?

Business intelligence is a big driver of storage because customers end up having multiple copies of their data – up to seven copies – so that drives a lot of storage projects. We’ve seen, across the board, a lot of customers strengthening their disaster recovery environments. That often has a storage impact.

Storage is ...?

The foundation of all computer-based information. Without storage, computers can’t do very much because they’re limited by memory.