Virtual Works, NetApp’s distribution partners in East Africa recently hosted a NetApp executive forum at a Nairobi hotel. In his opening remarks, James Munene, CEO, Virtual Works, said that unstructured data such as email and CCTV was now as important as structured data from CRM and other sources in an organization. Munene said that the demand for higher availability of data was increasing and that the often stressed 99.9 per cent  was not enough for some organizations. “Organisations should look at the cost incurred backing up data and also at the number of times that they tested their backups. Oragnisations also needed to question themselves on the availability of their backups, the safety of their backups and the time it took to get some piece of information from the backups”, said Munene.
He also pointed out that  some of the innovative features that NetApp had brought into the data storage industry included snapshots and double parity. NetApp was been used by large organizations including 80 per cent of the finance industry in Nigeria, MTN and the Kenya Bureau of Statistics to work on the 2009 census.

Information and Communications Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo said  Kenya stood to gain from emerging outsourcing opportunities in Europe. He  said the government was committed to making Kenya a communication hub through the creation of digital content.
“To support this the Government is now on the last phase of laying 20,000 kilometres of fibre. The government has also completed construction of the first data centre and is now on constructing a second one”, said Ndemo.

Ndemo added that the government was working on laws that would allow government bodies to outsource their data storage to the private sector.With the government consolidating department and ministry records, the PS said data security was now becoming a major challenge. The State Law office and the Lands Registry were having their databases consolidated and the police force would follow soon.

Matt Watts, NetApp's UK technical partner advisor  stated that companies needed to invest on building virtual stacks rather than physical ones, especially as ICT spending on on data grew while spending on servers decreased. An IDC research had shown that most organizations only used 40 per cent of purchased storage and out of that, only 20 per cent held valuable data.  Organizations therefore stood to save a lot if they used NetApp for their data storage needs. NetApp provides deduplication at no extra cost, allowing organizations to save on 45 per cent of data storage spending. According to Matt, NetApp had also been at the forefront of innovation in data storage such as unified storage, which had been touted as unnecessary in the beginning but was now a data storage standard.
Andre den Hond, Vmware's system's engineer gave the benefits that organizaions stood to gain by virtualization. This included reduced costs and minimized down times by consolidating physical systems. Andre said IDC research had shown that Vmware was the number 1 software investment for most organizations. Vmware also had a product called Vmotion that allows for live migration of virtual servers from one physical machine to another.
Other speakers at the forum included Emmanuel Schupp from Cisco who talked on integrated solutions from Cisco for virtualizaion, cooling and storage. Michael Muite from Oracle Africa said that that threats to data were going pace to pace with data and that most threats to an organization's data came from within. Oracle provides several security solutions to protect data from various threats.
Giving a presentation on green data storage, Watts said NetApp had realized that data centres could comfortably be operated at 23 degrees centigrade thus allowing outside air to be used for cooling if it fell below 23 degrees. Through innovation, NetApp had come up with better energy management techniques such as the use of thermal blinds that seperated cold and hot air. Other techniques were hot and air rooms, use of hot air from data centres to heat buildings and replacement of inefficient battery based UPS with cutting edge flywheel UPS technology.