CIOs are using a variety of ways to meet the company's storage needs. An IT Manager poll last week found that storage area network (SAN) solutions were popular amongst the channel's audience, as was direct-attached storage.
George Sinclair, CIO at standards body Standards Australia, said in May it had looked at its in-house project activity and the potential for growth of data needing to be stored. Based on this it has decided to move away from direct-attached storage, and the organisation has budgeted for a SAN.
"SAN systems come with some quite sophisticated software and that is one of the advantages, [along with] being able to upgrade quickly," Sinclair said. "The more flexible your internal system is to respond to business needs the better it is."
Standards Australia's business support services and IT operations manager, Gary Lipscomb, said it had tried other ways of limiting the amount of data it needed to store, such as quotas on e-mail and disk. "[But that] tends to be more political, and sometimes it's easier and safer to add extra storage," Lipscomb said. "But the problem then becomes backing it all up...which we're looking at as well."
One of the components to Standards Australia's storage planning has been looking at ways to archive e-mail, and also make it available to staff, without it being held on its primary storage device. "The ability to move data around, and have it accessible and on cheaper and more permanent storage with a SAN makes it easier," Lipscomb said.
The major issues facing IT managers at the moment are the growth of information enterprises are needing to store, and managing capacity of that storage, according to Phillip Sargeant, research director of servers and storage at industry Gartner.
Sargeant estimated that worldwide information needing to be stored was growing at about 50 percent each year. However, the dilemma was that enterprises couldn't afford to grow the IT staff needed to manage that storage at the same rate, he said.
"So obviously they're looking at different ways to improve efficiency, like storage networking," Sargeant said. Because of this, he believed that it boiled down to better management of storage.
In comparison, Graham Penn, director of storage at industry analyst IDC, told ZDNet Australia that anti-disaster measures and back up efficiency were major concerns for IT departments at the moment.
However, budgetary restrictions were hampering IT managers from dealing with these issues, Penn believed. "Although they are aware of the issue they're not being given much of a chance to do something about it," Penn said. "If you've got a headcount freeze or a budget freeze either you've got to work longer hours or you've got to find a way to do it better."
Penn said that, at the end of the day, IT management didn't normally have sign off for this type of expenditure. "So although the IT manager knows very clearly what needs to be done...they're not given the opportunity."
Nor does the problem stop there. For those organisations which do have the dollars to spend on storage, generally there weren't the skills or time inhouse to carry out the implementations, Penn said. This meant these enterprises needed to go to a storage integrator, consultant or to work with an IT supplier on the project.
Penn believes there is enough mature storage technology now available for CIOs to choose from, but that there was a need for IT departments to more carefully analyse costs to figure out what provided the best return on investment.
Storage is creeping up the list of concerns IT managers are facing, with a recent IDC report finding the primary concern for storage managers being anti-disaster measures, such as prevention and remedial actions.
