ByS Raghotham

IT administrators who feel that their storage capacities always fall short of requirements can take consolation from what Robert Nieboer, one of storage technology’s thought leaders, has to say. “Information is growing faster than storage cost is declining, and faster than people are able to deal with management complexity,”says Nieboer who serves as Sun’s APAC technology evangelist.

Nieboer blames poor storage management policies for much of the fault. He says that customers are often clueless about how much storage they have, almost nobody deletes any data, and the vast majority of data is never used. While the storage required for data that users are holding on to keeps outrunning capacities, it is found that only 30 percent of the storage technology that enterprises have are being used. Nieboer says that the problem is aggravated by a lack of context in data storage: “There may be canteen data from years ago sitting next to mission-critical data on some costly storage platform which results in underutilization of resources.”

The underpinnings of such a storage monster, according to Nieboer, has been the absence of a sound storage strategy resulting in hundreds of disconnected tactical decisions. “Whenever enterprises have needed more storage, IT managers have gone ahead and bought storage from whoever offered the lowest price, building up chaos over time.”

According to Nieboer, data classification and automation of storage management drive down cost and complexity. “A lot of the data that is unlikely to be ever used, but which organizations will still feel the need to preserve for various reasons, can be stored on tape rather than on disk. The latter spin continuously consuming power, generating heat and thus requiring cooling. But tape storage is static storage, saving a lot on electricity consumption.”

He proposes that IT managers acquire a better understanding of what the business requires, following which business and IT leaders must negotiate storage policy. “Such discussion would lead to guidelines on what resources to devote to what data. Organizations must draw crisp, clear guidelines—‘for this application and data, these are the policies’ and so on,” he says.

Nieboer, who is the co-creator of Sun’s information lifecycle management strategy, was in India recently to evangelize the company’s Information Management Maturity Model (IM3) over here. IM3 is built around four key functions: identity management, virtualization, encryption and software integration. The new model shifts the spotlight on data rather than storage per se.