CEOs
Some areas of IT spending are relatively easy to justify, because they can bring a direct improvement to the bottom line. Storage, though, is rarely one of these. For most boards, storage is simply an IT cost, and one that is too high.
Data is one of a business's most valuable assets, but in many cases companies may not have a full picture of how much information they are keeping, and why. Often data protection and back-up policies are technology-centric rather than based around the business value of the information.
When companies decide how to store or back up their information, they often base the decision around a device, such as a server, or a program, such as a database. Only rarely do organisations base their priorities on data types, such as all financial information, or all customer records and correspondence.
If boards want to control the proportion of IT spending being swallowed by storage, this will have to change.
"The emphasis now is on data lifecycle management," says Hubert Yoshida, chief technical officer at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). "Companies have already consolidated their data, and storage utilisation rates are going up. But some of that data should not actually be there. It could well be dead wood, or orphaned data." But, he cautions, businesses rarely purge their data stores, especially of unstructured data, such as document files or presentations.
"In terms of the bulk of storage sitting in data centres, as much as 80 per cent is duplicated," agrees Pat Martin, chief executive of StorageTek, the storage management company. He points out that companies will simply add more of the same storage, rather than picking cheaper or more efficient solutions for data that is not in use 24 hours a day. The problem will only worsen, as businesses face up to the need to maintain far more archival information for regulatory reasons.
Unaided, IT departments can only go so far in making data storage more efficient. Techniques such as storage area networks (Sans) and virtualisation can make dramatic and swift improvements in storage utilisation rates and the ratio of storage to IT administrators.
The storage networking company CNT cites fivefold improvements in the number of terabytes of data a single administrator can manage under a San; HDS estimates that with Sans, storage utilisation can double from around 35 per cent to 70 per cent. But this can offset data growth only for so long.
If businesses are to control the problem, they will need organisation-wide policies for information lifecycle management covering who stores what, where and for how long. Doing this can create a virtuous circle. "Archiving data makes you more efficient," says Hitachi Data Systems' Yoshida. "If your primary database is smaller, it will also be faster."
CIOs
The tools available to the CIO to manage storage have never been richer or more efficient. The challenge lies in persuading the board to release money for up-front capital investment even if it promises savings in the longer term.
Creating more efficient storage architectures costs money, and takes time. Most observers of the storage industry agree that to create mainframe-level efficiencies in distributed computing environments (Unix, Linux and Windows), companies need to move to a storage area network (San). Windows-heavy businesses might also need to add network-attached storage to handle flat files (for example, text-only files).
Although the difference in cost between storage arrays for a San and those designed to attach directly to a server is narrowing, companies still need to budget for the network itself. At the high end, fibre channel is still the architecture of choice, despite its relatively high cost and the complexities of setting it up.
The lower cost alternative, using iSCSI, does allow companies to build a San based around Ethernet standards. It might be possible to make use of spare ports on gigabit Ethernet switches, and IT departments can make use of their standard networking skills. But either route still requires cash up-front. In some cases, Sans can pay for themselves in a couple of years, but for a fully-costed project five years is quite usual.
"We have costed our move to a San over five years," says Ron Eagle, director for technology at Experian Europe, the financial information company. "We calculated the cost of it against the cost of direct attached storage over five years, but we expect the San to be three times as efficient and the return on investment to be 50 per cent better."
He admits, though, that it was hard to sell the upfront investment to internal customers, not least because they may see only the hardware costs. But CIOs often find that it is only by moving to a more flexible hardware architecture that they can introduce more efficient approaches to data management.
"Software makes getting control of your data easier but you have to move into a San configuration first, before you can do that," says Mark Delsman, chief technical officer of Adaptec, the storage hardware and component maker. Greater interoperability between different vendors' products is reducing the risk of companies becoming locked in to a system they cannot later expand.
However, CIOs seem more cautious about software investments than hardware spending, perhaps because the efficiency gains are harder to quantify. "Right now executives are looking for a payback within the fiscal year," says Steve Murphy, CEO of Fujitsu Softtek. "But we are also seeing IT executives whose bonuses are based on clawing back a number of terabytes of data."
Users
For users, the reality is that IT departments are no longer prepared to add storage whenever an individual or even a department asks for it. Companies are no longer willing to view storage as an unlimited resource.
The first, and most obvious restrictions are likely to apply to personal data. Some businesses have blanket policies banning MP3 files and digital photos from any company computer; others ban them from their servers. And it is becoming common to find that IT departments restrict mailbox sizes.
An e-mail directory of 100MB (megabytes) might seem large, but in practice attachments can quickly eat into this. IT managers will certainly want individual users to take more responsibility for culling duplicate documents and personal data from their e-mail accounts. If users fail to do this, they may find that companies deploy automated tools to remove the material instead.
At the departmental level, business managers who want additional storage-whether it is locally, on a file and print server, on an e-mail server or even for a central database-are having to answer far more rigorous questions about why they need the storage. CIOs are also moving to introduce more realistic internal costings for storage. As one CIO puts it, it is all too easy for users to demand a storage upgrade costing a thousand pounds, but that capacity might cost £5,000 to manage.
"Users will have to accept that storage is a finite commodity," says Alastair McAulay at PA Consulting. "But there is certainly increased awareness once you start talking about costs. It brings it home that this is not a resource that can be squandered. The challenge is to talk to the business."
Better data management policies will often also go hand in hand with more rigorous policies for protecting information. Staff working with laptops in particular are at risk of losing data either through loss or damage of their computer; there is also the worry that sensitive information could fall into the wrong hands. Rules governing backing up, and some form of data encryption, could become the norm for mobile workers.
"If you are going to treat data as an important asset, you have to understand its value," says David Liff, vice-president of storage at Computer Associates. "You have to be able to treat electronic data with the same level of confidence as paper. It has to be subject to rules and policies, or businesses cannot rely on it."
Increasingly, those rules will govern what cannot, as well as what must be stored on company computers. The days of treating the company's laptop as a free DVD player, music machine or storage place for holiday snaps could well be over.
