The latest study into how companies are coping with the storage
challenge shows that IT managers are still struggling with
spiralling volumes of data, often adopting networked storage
architectures to conquer the data mountain.
James Rogers
reports
At the end of 2001, Computer Weekly and specialist storage
consultancy Posetiv surveyed more than 600 senior IT professionals
in IT departments across the country to discover how they were
dealing with the data explosion.
Then at the end of 2002 Computer Weekly and Posetiv repeated the
exercise, this time involving more than 1,000 senior IT
professionals. The results confirm that IT managers are still
wrestling with the same storage issues. But a growing proportion
are adopting new networked storage architectures to help bring the
storage hydra under control.
Now, as in 2001, the overwhelming majority of respondents to the
Computer Weekly/Posetiv survey say they are experiencing growing
demand for data storage. A massive 96% of those surveyed reported
that their storage capacities were increasing - exactly the same
figure as in 2001. And once again, more than half of the
respondents reported that demand was being driven equally by
existing applications requiring greater storage capacity and new
applications generating fresh demand.
As in 2001, the single biggest application driving this growing
storage demand is messaging. Almost 70% of respondents cited e-mail
as the biggest culprit. Here, IT managers are being hit by a double
whammy. The volume of e-mails is still growing rapidly, but the
average amount of data in each e-mail is also increasing as users
adopt more data-hungry formats.
Messaging is closely followed by general office applications such
as Word and Powerpoint, identified by 44% of respondents as major
storage-capacity guzzlers. In third place, cited by 27% of
respondents, are internet-related applications such as streaming
video and voice technologies.
The fact that e-mail is by far the biggest driver of the growth in
storage demand underlines the central role this application now
plays in business processes. Experts say it also shows the
importance of developing a strategy to tackle the avalanche of
e-mails being sent and received by organisations.
Zarah Damji, research manager at independent analyst firm IDC,
believes that too few companies enforce limits on their employees'
e-mail accounts. "E-mail is a huge headache - a lot of companies
don't have any strategy in place for coping with e-mail capacity
thresholds." she says. It's not something that companies in the
small-to-medium-sized area tend to do systematically, she
adds.
However, recent legislation means businesses are under increasing
pressure to archive their e-mails for legal purposes. So IT
departments are having to do some hard thinking about how they
manage their storage.
It is, perhaps, not surprising then, that when senior IT
professionals were again questioned about their biggest
storage-related concerns, the results were strikingly similar to
those in 2001. Some 66% of those surveyed said that the biggest
cause of sleepless nights was still managing storage, compared with
70% in 2001. The second biggest concern, as in the last survey, was
the cost involved in managing storage.
Experts say these concerns emphasise the importance of effective
storage networking technologies such as storage area networks and
network attached storage (Nas). Graeme Rowe, marketing director at
Posetiv, explains, "Managing storage is a major issue and that's
why people are looking to centralise by putting in a San or a Nas -
use of these two technologies has gone up in the last few
years."
Certainly, the most recent research suggests that IT managers are
becoming increasingly familiar with San and Nas. Some 44% of
respondents to the 2002 survey said that they were already using or
planning to use a San, compared with 35% in 2001.
Use of Nas is also growing, with penetration levels higher than
Sans. Almost half (48%) of IT professionals surveyed are either
using or considering the technology, up from 39% the previous
year.
Rowe believes that centralising storage in this way makes good
sense on the part of IT managers. He says, "If everything is in one
place it is easier to manage."
San and Nas, both comparatively new technologies only a few years
ago, are becoming increasingly mainstream. The figures from the
Computer Weekly/Posetiv survey are in line with those from research
conducted by IDC.
"This shows that, despite the [economic] slowdown, people are still
thinking of networked storage solutions," says IDC's Damji.
However, for those companies already using a San, the research from
Computer Weekly and Posetiv reveals the same problems resurfacing.
As in 2001, lack of skilled people was the biggest problem
organisations with a San faced in 2002. Some 40% of San adopters
cited this as an issue in the most recent survey, compared with 46%
in 2001's study. Once again, this was closely followed in the
league table of San headaches by the initial cost of building a
San.
With pressure on capacity showing no sign of abating, it comes as
no surprise that spending on storage is expected to continue to
rise rapidly over the next 12 months. Some 68% of those surveyed
foresaw a storage spending increase in 2003, with only 4% expecting
investment to decrease. More than half said spending on storage
would grow by more than 5% in 2003, and one in 10 expected to
increase spending on storage by more than 25% this year.
Spending on storage has been growing for the past decade. But users
have been changing the way they spend this money. Whereas in the
late 1990s the key challenge for companies building storage
infrastructures was the acquisition of hardware, there is growing
emphasis on buying software to squeeze better use out of storage
hardware.
Rowe says, "We have seen in the last few years more and more
pressure from the business telling the IT department to justify its
spend on technology. San and Nas are an element of this, but you
have to put in effective storage management tools to increase the
utilisation of what you have got."
According to Rowe, a growing number of IT managers are looking to
storage resource management (SRM) software to enable them to see
who is using what storage, where and how. One of the key benefits
of SRM is its ability to automatically react if it identifies a
storage management problem such as a user running out of disc
space.
He predicts, "The one big issue in technology that will be at the
forefront this year is storage resource management solutions such
as those offered by Fujitsu Softek and Tivoli."
For Damji at IDC, the question of how to deal with storage
management falls into two parts. She says, "There are two ways of
dealing with storage management - you can tackle the specific
problem, such as e-mail, or implement a wider solution, such as
SRM."
SRM, however, provides the most comprehensive answer to the
question of storage management, according to Damji. She says, "SRM
is a much wider solution - it can generally be used to implement
better policy-based storage management for all sorts of
applications, not just e-mail."
One storage technology that has been hitting the headlines over the
past few years is virtualisation, which enables users to treat
their entire storage infrastructure as a single storage resource,
as opposed to a plethora of individual hardware devices. Rowe says,
"Virtualisation allows you, if you have got IBM and EMC storage
devices, for example, to link these devices together and let you
see one storage pool."
Rowe believes that users could resolve their storage management
headaches by making use of both virtualisation and SRM. "It's a
very shrewd company that would consider both SRM and virtualisation
to get the best out of their storage infrastructure," he
says.
However, the latest Computer Weekly/Posetiv research reveals that
less than a quarter of organisations are planning to implement
virtualisation.
Only 23% of respondents said that they were planning to introduce
the technology in the next two years, while a massive 43% had no
plans to introduce a virtual system whatsoever. Perhaps the most
surprising fact, however, was that 34% of respondents were not even
aware of what a virtual storage system was.
Virtualisation is, admittedly, a relatively new technology, albeit
one that has received considerable press attention over the past
year. For her part, Damji believes some companies may have been
flummoxed by the confusing messages they have received. "There has
been a lot of hype about virtualisation," she says. "That has
created a lot of confusion in the marketplace, and there are also a
lot of different solutions out there."
Despite the fact that storage is becoming a bigger issue for most
organisations, few have access to specialist expertise. The
overwhelming majority of firms are still relying on general
in-house IT expertise to make key storage decisions. In the latest
Computer Weekly/Posetiv survey, 74% of companies reported that they
were using their own general IT expertise to plan their long-term
strategies, down only 3% from the 2001 survey. In an identical
result to 2001, only one firm in 20 is making use of an outside
storage specialist.
Companies do appear to be paying greater attention to measuring the
return on investment they get from storage. As in 2001, only a
small proportion of firms are measuring their storage ROI
separately, with just 8% examining storage as a distinct entity
from their overall IT investment.
However, the latest research does reveal an increase of 10% in the
proportion of companies that measure storage ROI as part of their
overall spending on projects and systems. This may be partly the
result of the belt-tightening that has followed the global economic
slowdown, although taking a more strategic view of their storage
can only help firms tackle longer-term issues.
On the strength of the past two surveys, the hot topic for the next
few years will continue to be storage management. If companies
don't get a grip of their existing storage, they will only face a
tougher time in the future.
After all, it seems unlikely that the amount of data produced by
companies will decrease over the next few years. On the contrary,
we are living in an increasingly data-intensive age, so the volume
of information used by firms will continue growing. IDC's Damji
says, "If companies don't get effective storage management in
place, then they could just end up spending a lot more money on
hardware then they need to." The focus is already moving onto
software and its functionality, she adds.
www.posetiv.com