Firms fail to control storage

A survey of 251 IT managers with storage responsibilities, sponsored by storage management software provider Sagitta, suggests that storage needs will double in the next two years, from a level already 150 percent up in three years. For public-sector organisations the growth is even greater.

But poor utilisation of existing storage, lack of cost measurement to assist management, backup difficulties and an apparent lack of coherent plans for storage upgrades were all cited as reasons why storage is proving troublesome.

The survey follows focus group research in March that showed few organisations had a clear storage strategy.

"Its rather frightening," said Andy Norman, Sagitta managing director. "[Storage managers] are like rabbits in headlights, scared and paralysed. To get storage under control probably involves new technology and skills, and they are not sure that they have the skills."

Organisations said they were anxious to drive up storage utilisation from the current 56 percent, but there was no consensus on how to achieve this.

Suggested strategies included buying more DLT automatic tape feeders, consolidation of existing servers and storage through storage area networks (SANs), and "making the business functions own their requirements". Centralisation or consolidation of servers, although the most popular approach, was only suggested by 15 percent of respondents.

Equally worrying, almost three-quarters were unable to quantify storage costs. Of those who could, 67 percent put the cost per gigabyte at below £50 but some organisations said they were paying much more, pulling up the average to £168.

Only 28 percent were measuring the cost of downtime and 40 percent had no plans to do so. Only 33 percent were attempting to measure upgrade costs, but 44 percent were not planning to do this.

The organisations represented an even split between public sector, finance, manufacturing/retail, media/professional, and others. All the organisations had over 50 employees, 66 being small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 200 employees, 94 being enterprises with up to 1,000 staff, and 85 had over 1,000 staff.

Daily backups typically took one to six hours within an available window of 10 hours, but 16 percent reported experiencing regular backup problems.

It was unclear how companies supporting 24-hour or multiple time zone working were coping with backup demands.

For hardware, most companies had between 10 and 50 servers and a mix of storage that could include directly attached and network-attached storage or SANs. "But they might as well throw half of it away [without a storage strategy]," argued Norman.

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