IT professionals often talk about how they need to look at storage requirements, and figure out how much capacity they will need in the future. But how do enterprises accurately work out what their storage demands will be in 10, five or even two year's time?
Surveys of IT professionals who manage their organisation's storage have also found a growing concern for future planning. A survey conducted by vendor StorageTek earlier this year found that 58.3 percent of respondents saw capacity planning to be their greatest storage concern.
If traditionally your company has stored a lot of material in hard-copy form-in filing cabinets or off-site storage facilities--how do you figure out how much space this information would take up if you stored it electronically? There is also the added question of whether you in fact want, or need, to transfer all this paper-based data to electronic storage formats.
Also, if storage is growing exponentially as some industry pundits claim, can you financially afford to install systems to store all information the organisation creates? There are some regulatory and accounting reasons why certain data has to be stored for a set period of time. To inadvertently delete or destroy information that should have been retained could cause major problems down the track.
On the surface making a guesstimate of how much storage space you will need in a year or two seems like a simple exercise. But for companies who many only have moved to electronic storage in the past five years there is little past experience to draw upon.
What are your thoughts about estimating future storage requirements? How do you think Australian organisations can get it right? Talkback below or e-mail your comments to itmanager@zdnet.com
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