How Storage Professionals are Dealing with Increased Business Demand
By Robert Stevenson, Managing Director, Storage Research, TheInfoPro

Over the past few years, Fortune 1000 (F1000) Storage organizations have seen continuous increases in business demands for information growth - a trend that is not expected to slow down any time soon. A recent study published by TheInfoPro, an independent research network and leading supplier of market intelligence for the IT industry, indicates that 41% of storage organizations are planning budget increases, while 36% anticipate budget decreases. The vast majority of those planning budget decreases are expecting dramatic cuts of 25% or more, showcasing that the market is under considerable pressure to reduce costs, as storage as a percentage of overall IT costs continues to rise.

How, then, are these organizations dealing with this explosive growth need, when simply spending more money is not an option? What technologies are storage professionals considering that will allow them to increase productivity, save money and innovate - without risking service expectations? And what vendors are being turned to as storage professionals strive to navigate this ever-changing landscape?

In its Wave 9 Storage Study, which details technology adoption trends and timeframes, management techniques and vendor performance data for the storage industry, TheInfoPro finds that managing storage growth, proper capacity planning and backup administration are the top pain points for Storage professionals (Figure 1).

Question: What are your two biggest pain points?

Figure 1

However, on average, less than 50% of F1000 storage capacity is actually in business use. As businesses expand their existing and new applications with larger data sets, organizations are being forced to accelerate provisioning productivity first, and address storage optimizations and consolidations second - a very frustrating thing, as a majority of storage professionals are looking to incorporate a proactive consolidation strategy.

Data archiving and intelligent data classification are also high on the list of pain points for Storage organizations, as they are faced with increased responsibility to showcase compliance with legislative mandates, such as Securities Exchange Commission Rule 17A-4, the USA PATRIOT Act and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS), which call for the preservation of more data for longer periods of time. In fact, F1000 organizations anticipate that the capacity of their archiving tiers will increase 52% by the end of 2007, as they work to create more efficient and long-term email, application and e-discovery storage methodologies to meet these legislative and industry-specific standards.

In addition to simply increasing their storage capacity - which is in the plans for 36% of storage organizations - many are also planning to leverage technologies such as deduplication (Figure 2). Deduplication provides a more efficient way to eliminate the overwhelming amount of data that appears in more than one place, rather than storing all of this data in multiple places. Because backup activities currently take up the second largest amount of a Storage professional's time, deduplication not only saves organizations storage space, but also saves time and bandwidth because less data is now being sent to backup.

Figure 2

Some of the other technologies that storage organizations are working to incorporate into their storage infrastructures to help address the pain points include information lifecycle management (ILM), structured data classification and archiving, and both file and block virtualization.

About the Author
As managing director of TheInfoPro's Storage Sector, Robert L. Stevenson is responsible for all research and consulting services covering the storage and storage networking market. Prior to joining TheInfoPro, Robert worked for Nielsen Media Research as a technology strategist and storage architect, where he helped build out their 1 PB SAN with over 1800 ports. He also worked for Sun Microsystems, as a managing consultant focusing on network storage and high performance computing.