"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."