The one consistent theme in the digital world is that growth is a constant. It is estimated that from 2009 to 2020, the size of the digital universe will have increased 44 fold ; that is a 41 per cent increase in capacity every year. Storing, locating and extracting value from high volumes of data will become increasingly complex.

As the digitally-enabled business world evolves, the mix of data and its anticipated usages are going to change as well. Already, there is an increased diversity of data types with 80 per cent  of today’s data being unstructured and the reuse of data is shrinking, with 80 per cent of data never being used after 90 days . However, regulation and compliance dictates that data is adequately archived for long periods of time, sometimes up to triple digits in number of years.   

The fall out of the way data storage is currently handled is massive – the impact on the environment is one of these factors. Storage already consumes 40 per cent of datacentre power and it is predicted that within ten years the total energy consumed by storage solutions could increase to more than six times what it is today. Based on these predictions, storage could represent over 75 per cent of the energy consumed within the datacentre and if you consider that 80 per cent of data is never looked at again after three months, storage is a major IT trigger for energy burn out.

Another fallout is cost and the added expense of managing growing volumes of data.  The business critical nature of data is driving up storage management costs by 25 per cent per year , so in the long term it will become the number one cost within many datacentres. Therefore, it’s becoming increasingly more important to align the value of data with the capabilities and cost of the storage it is stored on.

Looking forwards, the future of storage management must be simple, easily accessible, cost efficient, environmentally friendly and streamlined, so organizations can function and perform quicker and better.

Striving for nirvana
There are three essential elements that must be considered when formulating a storage strategy to meet growing data demands – the evolving function of the datacentre, business drivers, and the ‘nirvana’ storage solution.

Today’s typical datacentre is migrating from a physical, static, and heterogeneous set-up, to a grid-based virtualised infrastructure to a cloud computing environment that enables self service, policy-based resource management, and capacity planning. Along the way, the storage solution must be able to support this style of datacentre, so it is critical that the storage system is dynamic enough to support the difficult to predict demands of these application environments through a tiered approach.

Reducing cost was at the top of the CIO’s agenda yesterday, now business growth and profitability is. The storage strategy must fall in line with these objectives.  So, regardless of an organisation’s size, the storage solution must be able to scale to solve the larger, more complex business problems and it has to perform in real-time so organisations can react and make business decisions immediately. Likewise, the infrastructure has to be efficient so complex business problems can be effectively solved at a reduced cost and improved speed, and there must be data integrity built in to meet long-term business and regulatory compliancy.

Finally, there is the liberating act of creating a ‘storage nirvana’, should cost and incumbent infrastructure not be an object. For a CIO, this would probably include on-demand secure data access, application aware storage optimisation, unlimited capacity, scalable performance, appliance-like rapid deployment, and integrated application, system and storage management. Although, this nirvana is a distance away, these ideas must be taken into consideration to guide organisations onto a path of accelerated performance, profitability and lower IT costs.