If New Zealand businesses want to reduce the amount of money they spend on data centres then outsourcing is the way to go, Brocade says.

As businesses emerge from the wake of the credit crunch and the aftershock of the recession, cost is an omnipresent factor for companies around the world, Brocade vice president for Asia Pacific Deb Dutta told NBR today.

Mr Dutta said storage was not a recession proof industry but as data continues to soar and increases exponentially daily, it is a commodity businesses cannot ignore.

Mr Dutta said the answer for New Zealand businesses, and predominately small or medium sized businesses, was to outsource to data services either in the cloud or a hosting facility. He said this will reduce the initial capital cost of installing a data centre and will remove the cost of maintaining it.

The increase in regulatory compliance has further driven the need for additional storage, especially for financial and government institutions that are legally required to keep information up to seven years.

But by outsourcing information, businesses can buy storage on demand in a pay-as-you-go service, meaning businesses can increase or decrease its storage capacity depending on the current need.

Mr Dutta said within the next three years 60% of networks would be restructured to cope with the huge and constant growth of information.

He said despite the difference in corporate size, New Zealand and Australian businesses had similar problems as massive global conglomerates when it came to the data centre.

Brocade regional manager for Australia and New Zealand Graham Schultz said the global trends within the data centre were virtualisation, consolidation and convergence.

Mr Shultz said another key trend was power consumption and energy efficiency. “New Zealand like many countries around the world is trying to drive the green data centre. Sustainable data centres reduce power - the major cost for data centres.”

Mr Shultz said businesses were looking at how to save energy and money now more than ever before.

Brocade was in Auckland today for the company’s road show that has been travelling around the world.

New Zealand is the 30th country the conference has visited. Brocade is travelling around the world to discuss the future of the data centre in the wake of its US$3 billion acquisition of Ethernet equipment company Founder Networks from Silicon Valley, California.

Brocade specialises in data centre networking solutions and services.