Storage is at a premium

By Tracey Caldwell

European companies are increasing their storage capacity by 60 per cent year on year to cope with the explosion in data, according to research company Gartner. And the demand for storage solutions may well be higher in countries that are just entering the EU and have to comply with myriad new regulations.

The soaring cost of storage and the need to archive data carefully to comply with regulations that demand accessibility and a clear audit trail have led storage vendors to rekindle the concept of information-lifecycle management (ILM). “The explosion of e-mail use has caused major headaches for businesses, especially as transactions are increasingly conducted via e-mail and more items are digitised. The cost of managing all this has spiralled,” says David Smith, UK enterprise storage marketing manager at HP.

“Companies have got to be able to retrieve documents and prove they haven’t been tampered with. ILM is about process and policies, and technology underpins that. For example, companies need to develop policies about how long to keep personal e-mails and to archive them in a controlled manner,” he adds.

“ILM has been around for thirty years but because of issues such as compliance it is an ideal time to sell the concept of ILM,” says Robin Burke, research VP at Gartner. He points to other factors that have kick-started the ILM sell: “We now have some of the hardware and software that will allow us to undertake ILM activities. If executed properly, ILM allows companies to comply with regulatory requirements and to make the best economy of hardware and hardware purchases in the future.”

Under the ILM architecture, data is created and initially stored on the highest performing and most expensive storage; that is, disk arrays arranged as a storage-area network. These are able to make the most effective use of partitioning by virtualisation. This enables data to be moved efficiently from expensive, high-level storage to cheaper storage.

According to Burke, in the past year or so, nearline storage has become less expensive and more efficient while at the same time traditional offline storage in the form of tape backup has improved. “1Gb of stored data costs $50 to put on to high-performance online storage, $15 to put on to mid-range arrays and only $1 to store on tape libraries,” he says.

Software vendors such as Oracle and SAP are working with storage vendors to move towards the seamless transition demanded by ILM, so that storage systems can identify which application the stored data is coming from. “The two types of vendors are now talking. Vendors have been trying to improve their ILM offerings by making strategic acquisitions. EMC acquired a number of companies to plug holes. Other companies that don’t have the resources for R&D are announcing partnerships every day,” Burke says.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, EMC and Veritas posted the strongest results among the top five vendors, with 30.5 per cent and 23.4 per cent year-over-year growth respectively. IBM and HP both gained ground on Computer Associates, resulting in a three-way statistical tie for third position.