He was speaking at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium (IIIS) event in Singapore. Attended by about 150 storage technology decision makers, managers and specialists on 29 June at the Raffles City Convention Centre, the event was jointly organised by Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and Computerworld Singapore.
"Today, the bulk of IT budget consumed by maintaining huge storage & processing facilities, software licensing costs, versioning and migration of apps," he said. Some 80 percent is being spent on maintaining these costs while only 20 percent is allocated to innovation. The ideal state should be that the IT budget gets split 50-50 on innovation and keeping the lights on.
And in the maintenance of the legacy environment, the complexity of IT management rises when the business continues to grow.
Thirdly, the cost of power in the data centre is going outrun everything in the IT budget, said Chellam, even more than "what you are going to spend on hiring talent". And the Singapore government has recognised the high power consumption levels in the data centres, and is looking at ways to build green data centres that consume less power, he added.
The issue of power also became a critical concern for Japanese telco Softbank following the earthquake and tsunami disasters in March 2011.
Faced with the challenge of having to help customers recover their business quickly, Softbank turned on its cloud service for non-profit organisations, government agencies and existing customers, one year ahead of schedule, according to NetApp ASEAN's managing director Scott Morris.
"Softbank asked us, 'how can I put my people back to work, if they can't get to our building to work in? And how do I get my business serving 37 million customers back up and running?" said Morris.
And, where Softbank had previously required a week to deploy 1,000 desktops, with a NetApp agile data infrastructure, they were able to accelerate the pace to deploy 1,000 virtual desktops in a single day and ultimately scaled to 14,000 virtual desktops within two weeks.
With thousands of employees able to work from home, Softbank surpassed government energy targets, cutting its internal energy costs by 39 percent in its corporate headquarters.
The IIIS event took a fresh approach to differentiate itself from the usual technology conferences by incorporating debate sessions between vendors. Playing the role of moderator for these debates was Simon Piff, associate vice president, enterprise infrastructure, IDC Asia/Pacific.
The first session, between Dell's Chellam and NetApp's Morris, focused on the topic "The Journey to the Cloud". Some of the issues discussed were key barriers to cloud adoption, as well as data security and integration challenges that users face during implementations.
The next presenter was Shiva Anand Neiker, storage sales leader, IBM systems & technology group, ASEAN, who shared with the audience some findings from Forrester Research on the benefits of storage virtualisation.
Firstly, the technology helps reduce storage management and administration cost, said Neiker. "This allows a core group of administrators to control multiple assets across a distributed storage environment, where you have 50 percent efficiency improvement," said Neiker.
Secondly, users are able to improve capacity utilisation of existing storage assets by some 30 percent, and with that, "you can control the growth of future spending".
Thirdly, IT leaders can capitalise on being able to purchase the lowest cost storage resources, with "controlled growth on average by 20 per cent," said Neiker.
Still on the topic of storage virtualisation, Scott Drummonds, director, infrastructure and virtualisation specialists, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC, shared his organisation's vision in this area.
"The future about virtualisation is going to be of self-service," said Drummonds. "It is the same way people are deploying cloud by setting up policies and allowing customers to self-service."
With virtual machines lending a helping hand in provisioning, "we are going to construct storage based on policies that is going to self-service deployed," he said.
IBM's Neiker and EMC's Drummonds took part in the next debate session, which focused on the newer iterations of virtualisation including storage virtualisation. Both speakers shared their views on case studies as well as strategy and key benefits for storage virtualisation implementations.
Saravanan Krishnan, director, platforms & solutions business, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems, shared with the audience a metric-based approach called storage economics that explores cost reduction opportunities within storage infrastructure.
"Price-per-TB is the wrong metric in making storage decisions. There are hidden costs everywhere including labour and maintenance," said Krishnan.
The process identifies some 34 types of costs, measures unit cost baselines, isolates direct and indirect costs and determines cost owners, and maps costs to investments that can reduce costs. Unit cost reduction and ROI can also be predicted.
The last presenter of the day, Subramaniam Venkatesan Balaji, storage practice leader, TS consulting, APJ region, HP, shared with the audience a case study on how US-based Ceva Logistics employed HP's 3PAR to consolidate various legacy storage systems.
"We managed to reduce storage capacity by 67 percent with 3PAR's thin conversion technology," said Balaji. The legacy six storage boxes was cut down to just two, and the exercise eliminated the need to rent additional hosting space in its Jacksonville data centre.
The completed project reduced administration efforts from 40 to 60 man hours per week to one hour per week. 3PAR now offers more granular data protection and backup capabilities. The logistics provider's data centres in Jacksonville and Houston now backup to one another with remote copy taking just four hours.
The final debate session between Hitachi Data Systems' Krishnan and HP's Balaji focused on optimising storage growth and management within organisations. The duo covered various approaches for storage optimisation including tiering, deduplication, compression and capacity optimisation.
In his closing remarks, IDC's Piff summarised the event thus: "The key takeaways are alignment with the business and understanding what the business requirements are. Manage the data with consolidation, virtualisation and automation."