More than 61 percent of respondents to an Australian survey conducted by storage vendor StorageTek said that storage management caused the most difficulty or concern. This was followed by 58.3 percent, who regarded capacity planning to be their greatest concern.
Respondents used a variety of methods to control storage costs. Just under 70 percent were consolidating storage in a bid to cope, with 40 percent looking to educate end users about storage conservation. Buying at the lowest price, keeping older equipment longer and deleting older data were other methods the IT professional respondents cited.
Philip Belcher, managing director at StorageTek Australia/New Zealand, said that he found it interesting that almost a quarter of organisations surveyed were aggressively deleting data. "While this is a sign of the difficult economic times, it can be a risky approach," Belcher said. "Important business information may be disappearing in the rush to clear storage space. This is an unnecessary risk".
Respondents to the survey were staff responsible for storage management, from medium and large enterprises. More than 81 organisations were surveyed, according to a statement from StorageTek.
Ken Sadowski, global manager at StorageTek's strategy and architecture practice told a breakfast briefing earlier this week that IT professionals were grappling with cost, complexity and control.
Sadowski said that the average corporation averaged less than 40 percent utilisation of its storage, when this should ideally be 80-90 percent. "[Organisations are] accustomed to pre-buying or overbuying storage because we're not sure what we'll use," he said. "[You] need to understand what's going on with your data".
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