"Storage is a victim of its own success," said Ashley Barlow, corporate IT manager for online recruitment firm Topjobs.net. "Rapid increases in [storage] technology can make the buying decision more difficult than it should be. The right decision today can easily be made to look silly tomorrow."
Wide choice
With the range of storage choices growing almost as quickly as the data itself, opportunities to look silly abound. The choices now start with file servers  the current default choice for most companies  and continue through storage area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS) devices, storage-on-demand schemes, storage service providers (SSP) and managed, 'utility' services, such as those recently announced by IBM and Compaq.
To make matters even worse, each of those options is a moving target. Some of the technology around SANs, for example, is still in flux, making it hard for companies to mix and match hardware from different providers. Meanwhile NAS devices have moved from low-end file server replacements to enterprise-class solutions that rival SANs in capacity, capability and complexity. The variety of storage-on-demand schemes is also growing, with options ranging from quick delivery of new hard drives to pre-installed storage that can be activated on the fly. And all of these options can be used in various combinations, depending on the application.
IT managers are, of course, used to racing against technology obsolescence and weighing the merits of competing products and services. That is almost the definition of the job. But storage decisions are more important than most. They effect how companies manage what is often their most valuable asset:Â data.
"The cheapest is not necessarily best,"said Dayrell Drake, European strategic business manager for Hewlett-Packard's storage division. "If you looked at [storage] only from the financial perspective, the choices would be a lot easier. But the IT manager has to weigh things like security. The security of the data can be so high a priority that cost becomes secondary."
Analysts said IT managers have to weigh three criteria before choosing the mixture of solutions that is right for them. "Weigh up security, total cost of ownership and whether the company can find enough skilled IT professionals to [manage storage] Â in that order," said Robin Burke, principal storage analyst for Gartner.
European businesses tend to be more conservative than their US counterparts, which can limit the options, said Burke. "For security reasons, established European companies are less likely to outsource their mission-critical data to datacentres," he said. He added that tends to restrict the options to those that let companies maintain full control over their own data.
That reluctance to let go may limit the use of storage service providers, which often store data offsite, typically in a secure facility  or two, for disaster recovery  or provide services at a third-party hosting facility. Most observers said that SSPs remain most attractive to startups, such as dot-coms.
"SSPs are most relevant to those companies which need someone else to take control of the IT side," said Robin Pilcher, European marketing manager for Tivoli. "For dot-coms, data is essential to the survival of their business, but managing it is not an area they are proficient in."
Pilcher said that large, traditional businesses are usually more reluctant to use such outsourced services.
"Traditional firms own far more complex and confidential data structures," Pilcher said. "The closest they will get is to do what Abbey National did earlier this year [and move] the IT department off-site, to be managed by IBM at a datacentre."
Data mirroring
However, some observers disagreed with this view. Banks, which guard their data most jealously, routinely send data offsite. "Every bank uses mirroring," said Bryn Sage, sales director at InTechnology, which last week opened a SAN training centre in London for resellers. Mirroring involves copying data, usually in near real time, which ensures that banks do not lose transactions if the primary data is lost or damaged. "It's just a case of taking the next step [to use an SSP]," Sage said.
But if the thought of a stranger having access to corporate data is too scary to contemplate, managed solutions may provide a compromise. Programmes such as Compaq's Private Storage Utility leave most of the data, other than offsite backups and mirrored data, in the datacentre  while leaving the management to someone else. According to research firm IDC, 55 percent of money spent on storage is for management. However, managed solutions still leave outsiders accessing corporate data, even if only during periodic service visits.
Finding the right solutions may take a while. For many firms, it is easier to just add a new file server or a new hard drive to an existing server than to adopt new technology, especially when data is doubling or tripling every year and there is little time to make wholesale adjustments. Many of the new options require major changes in the way IT departments work, and such changes could take a long time to implement.
"It takes a number of years for companies to change their storage solution," said Dennis Winderbank, secretary of the Enterprise Network User Group. "A lot of companies are looking at SANs, but the migration effort required is considerable." Inertia, then, may be the first and biggest hurdle to overcome before any options are considered.
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