Microsoft loses the plot over storage

Microsoft has lost the plot when it comes to intelligent file storage, claiming that it is a hardware issue, where costs are coming down.

Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft, said he was confident that intelligent data storage was not a real problem. Storage capacity was not limited, he said, although he admitted that rich content such as video drove up storage needs.

"It is an interesting technology, but there are certain priorities," he said. "The cost of storage [hardware] is coming down dramatically. Even so, both for disaster recovery and keeping historical data you need live backups. But you can move data from primary storage to backup systems such as optical disk."

But as recently as last week, IT manager Abby Ewen pointed out that 90 per cent of the three million Word documents she has on her storage disks are obsolete. As importance levels cannot be specified at file level, she cannot delete unimportant ones to free space and focus on the files that matter.

Gordon Buxton, senior developer at Oxford Computer Consultants, said that Microsoft would be ideally placed to tackle this problem as its desktop software plays a core role in file management.

"It would be pretty useful if users could identify during the workflow of a document, whether it needs to be kept, for how long, and whether it needs to be encrypted," he explained.

Microsoft's Remote Storage service, the Windows 2000 version of Hierarchical Storage Management, aims to manage the cost of storing vast quantities of data. But its only criteria for identifying obsolete files is to look for files that have not been used for 30 days - clearly not enough for sophisticated file management.

"Companies are starting to realise that they need to bring in a tier in archiving," said Bob Plumridge, software director at storage vendor Hitachi. "But when vendors talk about storage management they usually mean managing hardware not data. There are no good products available for data management."