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Computerworld - Palm Desert, Calif.
Information technology executives and storage administrators who say they're dealing with an explosion of data continue to buy cheap disk storage to deal with the overload. Problem is, that approach will force IT managers to hire additional staffers and spend more than they need to manage their organizations' data effectively.
In response to these challenges, IT managers attending Computerworld's Storage Networking World conference here last week said that they're considering using emerging storage resource management tools.
But even those tools have shortcomings, including a lack of adherence with industry standards, as well as interoperability issues and a dearth of security features. Those drawbacks have kept many IT managers from taking the plunge.
"There's an insatiable demand on IT departments to put data online," said Michael Prince, vice president and CIO at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. in Burlington, N.J. "We've embraced every bit of storage technology in terms of innovation [that] we could over the past few years . . . yet the complexity and interoperability issues are huge things."

"There's an insatiable demand" to store data online, says Michael Prince, Burlington Coat's CIO.

However, during the next two years, intelligent RAID devices and software will enable IT departments to provide storage as an enterprisewide utility that can be centrally pooled from many resources, said many practitioners. Storage will be set up under temporary capacity and performance parameters for business units, which will then be charged by use, they added.
"Right now, 90% of storage is still direct-attached," said Steve Duplessie, an analyst at The Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass. "We spent a lot of years spending money on IT like drunken sailors. We can't do that anymore. It's just not reasonable to think we can still scale in the same order of magnitude."
Karl Huff, a vice president at Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago, said his company has been trying to do more with less as its data storage requirements have exploded from 1TB of capacity in 1999 to more than 40TB in a storage-area network (SAN) today. That number is expected to grow to 100TB by early next year.
"At that growth rate, if you don't have management systems in place, you're going to have trouble," said Huff, whose storage administrators had been keeping track of applications and their use on spreadsheets - something that became far too complicated over time.
"If a switch port goes out, I don't know who to call," said Huff, who is rolling out storage management software from Scotts