OIL and gas industry equipment giant FMC Technologies is banking on virtualisation to improve its data storage and back up operations this year.

'We started looking into virtualisation a year ago but have put the plan on hold while the economic outlook remained uncertain,' said Kenneth Lorenzo, senior network engineer at FMC Technologies, Singapore.

With deployment in the cards again, he said the company 'will probably explore the possibility of establishing some virtualisation platform either on its own or as part of our disaster recovery planning'.

He added: 'We would like to see how we can leverage virtualisation technologies to help protect and back up data as well as speed up the process which we can generate and store it.'

Echoing the bullish sentiment of many market watchers regarding IT spending this year, Mr Lorenzo said FMC is likely to splash out to increase its storage capacity in the coming months.

'Information management is one of our top priorities this year. Data is growing constantly, so we are looking at how we can implement some form of data classification to our business process and information.'

This means identifying several tiers of data according to importance, with different policies attached to each level, he said.

For example, FMC's engineering diagrams and graphs are graded as high importance and are routed to more sophisticated storage solution.

'Virtualisation will be an important part of this effort,' he said. 'We are also looking to improve our storage efficiency through techniques such as de-duplication and compression.'