Industry must get storage under better control

Complexity, hugely increasing data volumes, compliance requirements and lack of centralised storage management are costing companies time and money. Research by integration services firm Morse shows IT staff at 25% of organisations spend over 40% of their time managing storage, including operations data, back up, email and application data. 74% say 20% of their IT departments’ time is used in this way. Data volumes alone are a huge problem. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) reckons large organisations saw an average storage growth rate of 80% from 1999 to 2003. But data being managed in departmental silos isn’t helping: Morse finds 64% of IT managers agree that no central view or associated storage devices are contributory complicating factors. “Traditionally, organisations have purchased storage on a departmental or application specific basis,” comments Derek Lewis, software manager, Morse IBM division. “By managing storage centrally, IT managers can increase utilisation in addition to making management easier. They need to look towards virtualisation technology as this will provide them with a single consolidated view of all data and storage resources.” Analyst Butler Group goes further: its latest report on managing storage warns not only of administrative waste but an explosion in unmanaged storage, security issues and the widening gap between current management abilities and the proliferation of devices. It suggests that users should be worried about the “huge pool of unmanaged data on laptops, mobile devices, and USB memory keys,” all open to abuse. It also points out the regulatory compliance means a need to demonstrate the ability to recover data quickly, and that buying more direct disk capacity isn’t a long term solution. Butler advises that policies and software desperately need implementing now. It recommends that enterprises get the fundamentals of storage optimisation, compliance, and protection right first, while also planning scalable utility storage models.