Storage: The inside story

The most obvious ongoing trend in storage is simple: size. Storage capacity, whether it be in disk, tape, optical or other formats, is steadily increasing, and the cost per megabyte continues to fall.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking this means that storage is getting cheaper. -The vast majority of the cost in storage is not in the disk but in the personnel," says Simon Johnson, director of enterprise solutions at Dell. The problem is exacerbated by businesses which choose the seemingly -cheap and quick now" option of simply adding extra servers when storage demands increase.

-They have farms and farms of servers to manage, and it's not a very elegant solution," says Harry Christian, regional director for Network Appliance. -They've grown on the back of storage needs, rather than using servers to deliver applications."

The trend is understandable. -Many applications need lots of temporary space, so people tend to overprovision, and you end up with excess," says Graham Titterington, senior analyst at research company Ovum. But such an arrangement is a nightmare when it comes to planning backup scenarios. -Any kind of disaster recovery based around multiple servers or multiple islands is very difficult," explains Johnson.

-There are lots of organisations with a variety of storage solutions. How do they know their whole environment is being backed up?" asks Richard Collins, head of Computer Associates storage division.

Everyone agrees that widely dispersed servers and storage are a horror story waiting to happen. -If you have a lot of point solutions out there, it's all too easy to have different policies on them. There needs to be some consistency," says Grant Smith, storage manager at Tivoli. Greg Bowden, national business manager for integrator Dimension Data, agrees: -You can't control a large infrastructure with point solutions all over the place." Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, capacity demands continue to rise. -People are frightened to delete data," according to Joan Tunstall, marketing manager for StorageTek. -It may have some business value that you don't perceive today. If it's something like e-mail, you may get into trouble for deleting it." (Just ask the guys at Enron or Microsoft.)

So how can you save on personnel costs and work more efficiently? Make things simpler by consolidating. -Consolidation is something that has really become top-of-mind for many businesses," says Christian. -It's not only about server consolidation, but bringing everything together. It's not about the upfront costs only."

Others agree. -The umbrella trend is simplification and consolidation, bringing together islands of storage from servers and desktops," says Johnson. -It's a pattern that's going to continue for some time."

-If you consolidate into a central pool, you only need one lot of working space," offers Titterington. -Of course you can just buy more disks, but then you have a big management problem on your hands. You get to the point where it takes longer to do the backup than there are hours in the day."

Hard-headed planning is critical. Businesses are asking questions prior to authorising purchases of hardware or changes in infrastructure. -Lots of CIOs are requesting more information on the types of data that reside in the organisation," says Collins. -We've also seen huge growth for running storage resource management services."

There are limits to the process of consolidation, but even if dispersed hardware is unavoidable, it can often be better managed. -It may not be physically possible to consolidate all your storage, but you can at least unify your storage management," says Smith.

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