Am I utilizing my storage capacity in the best possible way? That’s a question many CIOs throw at themselves today. Enterprise storage requirement seems to be insatiable. The amount of data that’s being generated everyday grows exponentially.

Data growth can be attributed to factors such as growing business, customer transactions, and compliance requirements that mandate storing historical data. Users receive files and distribute copies across the network. The other big resource hog is e-mail. Most users are careless about the way they maintain the Inbox folder on the server and on desktops.

While cost decreases for other aspects of IT, such as servers, processors, power and cooling—due to the availability of more efficient systems—the cost of storage continues to increase because of exponential data growth. Since budgets are slashed, IT managers are under a lot of pressure and must find clever ways of utilizing existing capacity.

Manmohan Jain, VP, Recovery Management, CA India Technology Center, said, “Every year, the average company is storing more data than they did in the previous year. This increase in yearly data storage is typically not a small one. Most companies are seeing double digit percentage increases over the previous year. This is putting a huge strain on IT budgets making the CIO ask: Can I afford to continually buy storage?” 

Unstructured data increases IT costs

Users also generate a lot of content and download files from the Internet. In addition, mobile users capture data on the road and upload it to the enterprise storage system. All this is called unstructured data and it is growing at an alarming pace.

Satyen Parikh, MD, India and SAARC, F5 Networks, opines, “Unstructured data is growing at a rate of 50 to 70 percent. In fact, it doubles every 18 to 24 months.”

As the volume of data grows, there are resource demands on the company’s disaster recovery and business continuity processes—and this also increases IT costs significantly. More data makes it harder to meet backup windows, replicate data between data center locations and remote or branch offices, and to provide application availability. “High availability of mission critical applications was always crucial but IT managers today have to figure out how to achieve it at reduced costs,” adds Jain.

While business leaders have always looked for solutions that drive down costs, the outcome is often the opposite. Observes Nirmal Puranik, Brand Manager – Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/SA, “Many (storage installations) are over-provisioned, highly  fragmented  and  rigid,  with  applications  and hardware  operating  in  silos. This can severely limit the enterprise’s ability to reduce cost, deliver quality service or manage risk.”