Back in the late 1990s, the first wave of the Internet alerted many businesses to the reality of operating around the clock, where their critical system’s downtime needed to be measured in minutes per year. Since then, the notion of what constitutes ‘high availability’ has been refined even further, with the oft-touted ‘five-nines’ uptime (systems up and running for 99.999% of the time) seen by some as too narrow; the new gold standard is absolute zero downtime.

The major proponents of this thinking are found not just in the world of ecommerce or banking, but in the modish world of Web 2.0, where online pace-setters such as Facebook and MySpace store enormous quantities of data in the form of pictures, audio files and video, all of which users expect will be accessible all of the time.

A new generation of user is emerging – one that expects access to their data to be guaranteed as a matter of course. Downtime is unthinkable; so too is the idea that a user may be served up the wrong data – as the owners of photo-sharing website Flickr recently found out to their cost when a software upgrade resulted in users’ being presented with other people’s photos. (Attuned to the new levels of user expectation, Flickr responded with a rapid fix and gushing apologies.)

But can experiences of Web 2.0 hold any lessons for the more prosaic world of enterprise IT? Mike Workman, CEO of storage systems company Pillar Data Systems certainly thinks so: the new expectations of information availability “are a very real-world” thing, he says.

Web 2.0 companies may be extreme examples he says, but they are coping with problems, such as unpredictable network demands and maintaining application performance amid peak-demand times, which are recognisable within the enterprise.

Others have the same perception, predicting a reaction. “This is going to transform how enterprises build their application infrastructure,” suggests Mark Lewis, chief development officer at enterprise storage titan EMC.

One organisation that demonstrates this is parcel delivery giant TNT Express. “We’re a transport company,” says Mike Harding, infrastructure development manager at TNT Express UK, “we’re not trying to push the boundaries of technology.”

And yet the company is an exemplar of the new enterprise realities. The business is characterised by short bursts of “very intense activity”: as one of its cargo planes lands, the packages must be unpacked, logged and sorted; customers also expect to be able to track their parcels wherever they are in the world. The key criteria for the storage environment that supports this are availability and scalability, explains Harding.

Thinking thin

Achieving such scalability is no mean feat. Many businesses have hitherto struggled with scalability, notes Andrew Manners, UK head of storage at systems giant Hewlett-Packard. Storage has been assigned on a theoretical assumption about the maximum capacity a given application may need – physical storage is allocated to a logical volume when the volume is created, which in effect means businesses have been “over-provisioning up-front”.

The concept of ‘thin provisioning’ is going to “transform the economics around storage”, argues Craig Nunes, marketing executive VP for 3Par, a storage company  that is pioneering the idea. He is dismissive of the “chubby” provisioning approach that is favoured by several of 3Par’s more traditional rivals.

Users gain real benefits from thin provisioning not only when storage capacity is allocated as it is needed, but when that allocation is done automatically – something he claims other companies have yet to master. “We believe that freeing up administrators’ time is an essential element of reducing costs,” he says.

The enthusiasm for thin provisioning is justified, notes Stanley Zoffos, an analyst with IT advisory group Gartner: its impact will be “profound”, he acknowledges. But because the technology relies on systems that support virtualisation of the back-end storage disk, the technology “has yet to be retrofitted into older storage systems.”

Nevertheless, the pressing need to rein in storage costs may eventually persuade CIOs to invest in state-of-the-art storage systems capable of using thin provisioning. The savings certainly look impressive. According to Zoffos’s calculations, as well as providing a cost-effective method to scale storage resources, thin provisioning should also improve utilisation rates, reducing the number of physical disks required to support a given workload. In turn, this also reduces power and cooling costs.

As recently as two years ago, power and cooling did not appear on the storage radar, but today they are uppermost concerns for all CIOs, notes EMC’s Lewis. By some estimates, 50% of data centres could have insufficient power and cooling capability within the next 12 months. This has also convinced many IT executives to look at

data centre consolidation and virtualisation as techniques for achieving efficiencies, says Lewis. And the ramifications of this trend will be dramatic.

Information overload

EMC is predicting that the benefits of data centre consolidation will compel enterprises to build so-called ‘information power plants’, where the vast majority of data – both structured and unstructured – will be centrally stored. This aggregation of data is the only cost-effective way to shield the business from the impact of rampant data growth, explains Lewis, but it comes replete with its own set of challenges.

If the overwhelming majority of enterprise data is stored in one place, it increases the pressure to deliver an always-on service. Likewise, by building such a richly-stocked data store, CIOs will have to impose commensurate access controls. If information needs to be available across an enterprise – and most probably across an ‘extended’ enterprise, which includes partners and suppliers – information assets need to be secure at every point, says Alan Laing, storage technology specialist at systems software maker CA.

The concept of end-to-end information asset security illustrates how the storage world is changing. An old-world view of storage would have a storage array provisioned for a given application; the introduction of network-attached storage, which allowed storage capacity to be pooled among many applications, first changed that model. But now even the way applications are being built is changing: a service-oriented approach to enterprise applications suggests that a single application may in reality be composed from smaller chunks of several unrelated applications. These composite applications may even be running within virtual environments, rather than on dedicated hardware. The notion of having chunks of data directly associated with specific applications is therefore beginning to look untenable.

However, in this new world, business leaders are going to need to understand a great deal more about individual data assets, to assess which business processes may call upon the data and which users have legitimate cause to access it, if they are to secure those assets, says Lewis. Effectively, storage management systems and applications will need some method of understanding how information assets tie in with an end-to-end business process – most probably through the use of metadata.

What is exciting about web services is that it provides businesses with a far more flexible and responsive method of automating business processes. But at the same time, it demands that enterprises become far more “information-centric”, says Lewis.

In fact, he concludes, that is the real lesson today’s business leaders can draw from the rash of Web 2.0 companies: it is their ability to deliver customisable, extensible services – whether it be embedding Google Maps into parcel delivery applications or adding weather-forecasts to fishing boat hire websites – using metadata to enrich the quality of the information provided, that is lighting the way for today’s enterprise leaders. “We’re moving to an information-centric world,” says Lewis; it’s time the enterprise caught up.