Growing Pains

With staff budgets static and storage capacity likely to grow another 60 percent through to the end of 2005, CIOs must explore some form of automation for their data management.

Scratch below the surface of vendor-speak and there is a complex set of technologies designed to fulfil the promise of automated storage management. While vendors and analysts alike have their own spin on how to segment the choices, Gartner's basic definition is:

• Storage infrastructure - volume management and virtualization and data replication software
• Data management - backup and recovery products, as well as hierarchical storage management and archive software; and
• Storage resource management - provisioning and performance products.

For those who have spent much of their career in the mainframe environment, the evolution of the storage market must seem like a journey back to the future. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) has been around for the best part of 15 years, but with open systems the challenge is much greater.

It is surprising that market leader Hewlett-Packard, which snares 20 cents of every storage dollar spent in Australia, is not at the forefront of these changes. Kevin McIsaac, of Meta Group, says it is "staring down the barrel of its universal data centre strategy, which is more a long-term play than exploiting the opportunities of modular storage".

However, the technology lovers may be getting ahead of themselves. In the real world, HP, Veritas and IBM all report that they are spending a lot of their time engaged in consultancies to audit storage commitments rather than slam dunk another piece of new storage technology into the system.

Veritas's chief technology officer, Sal Fernando, says most of the audit action is from telcos, governments and banks. "Minimum levels of standards are now being set by global agreements or legislation such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley," he says. "This creates the need for new storage projects that are expensive to manage at a time when IT departments are being told to cut their costs."

HP's Ian Selway, whose team can spend between three and six months auditing a bank's storage commitments and figuring out the best way to move forward, voices similar concerns. "The first challenge is to understand the information that resides in the business and tie it into what the regulatory authorities require."

Compliance and governance are politically correct "terms du jour". No one is going to criticize budget allocation to ensure that a company can meet regulatory requirements. Storage and content management companies are relying on this attitude to help drive their business, especially in the arena of so-called "unstructured data" such as e-mails, formal memos and even instant messages.

The ability of a vendor to see a revenue opportunity and charge at it is another inescapable reality in a CIO's existence. So, let's be thankful there is more to life than death, taxes and storage.

Mark Hollands is an independent IT consultant and journalist. He spent three years as a Gartner vice president, and was, in a previous incarnation, editor of The Australian weekly IT section