27 Apr 2009
The mushrooming volume of corporate data is straining business managers' and CIOs' capacity to cope with storage resources, according to a new survey.
IT services vendor Unisys said the poll of 80 leading European executives showed almost two-thirds (63 per cent) of firms struggling to manage data storage resources effectively.
The respondents were each responsible for over 400TB of data, but half of those surveyed estimated their storage utilisation at around 40 per cent, with 15 per cent unable to estimate storage use altogether.
Forrester Research principal analyst Andrew Reichman said there is tendency for most organisations to over-allocate storage which, when combined with a limited ability to effectively forecast data, "leads to a significant gap in the amount of capacity that is allocated versus actually used."
Reclaiming over-allocated storage "requires application downtime to reallocate storage capacity, and to be successful means careful planning on the part of the storage department and buy-in from application teams that are likely to have other priorities," he said.
But Reichman added that: "In a down economy though, this effort becomes more worthwhile, as the purchase avoidance savings can be significant.”
Industry standard best practice calls for a storage utilisation figure nearer to 70 per cent, suggesting firms are overbuying storage just in case. Upping the storage utilisation to that suggested by best practice would extend hardware life and lower spending on technology updates.
When selected prudently and used economically, IT is the most effective business enabler industry has ever seen. But prudence has not been on the agenda for the majority of IT departments in recent years. Over the past decade most departments have adopted a relaxed attitude to expanding the infrastructure ? a move that has seen storage capacity double year on year.
The result has been an investment in terabytes of storage which, even at vastly reduced prices, is still a significant overhead. Not only has this added unnecessary cost and complexity to many organisations but it has also created massive business continuity risks.
Organisations have allowed, even encouraged, users to share information with no thought to control or infrastructure implications. Emails, with attachments, are regularly copied to tens of people and, hence, stored multiple times.
And just how many business leaders realise that this explosion in information and infrastructure is fundamentally compromising business continuity? Do they recognise the new challenges in place for effective disaster recovery strategies?
If there is one good thing to come out of the recession, it will be that organisations will become far more prudent when it comes to purchasing and managing technology.
A return to good, business biased IT practices will not only enable organisations to address IT costs today but will stand them in excellent stead as the recession lifts and the economic outlook brightens.
Posted by: Richard Barker, Managing Director, Sovereign Business Integration 29 Apr 2009
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