No Longer an AfterthoughtStrategic business apps demand a strategic approach to storageLook around. Mountains of the stuff are piling up all around us. There's so much of it to be gathered, contained, secured, and managed that we hardly know where to begin. But one thing is for sure: Locking it away and forgetting about it is not an option. The costs are so high, and the risks so great, that putting our heads in the sand will only invite disaster. No, I'm not talking about radioactive waste or toxic sludge. I'm talking about data. Regular-old, garden-variety business data. The constant proclamations about data volume growth are no longer surprising, but they still boggle the mind. Perhaps the most interesting study came out of the University of California at Berkeley (under sponsorship by EMC Corp., of course) in 2000. The Berkeley team estimated that whereas the human race had amassed 12 exabytes of information through 1999, as of this writing — that is, mid-2002 — the next 12 exabytes have been stockpiled, mostly in the form of digital information. (See www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info for the full report.) The Berkeley study forecasts that data stored on disk in enterprise and departmental servers — much of it business data associated with information-intensive ERP applications, data warehouses, and CRM and supply chain systems — is doubling every year. Significantly, according to the Enterprise Storage Group, slightly more than half of this data will consist of "reference information," or fixed digital assets that are retained for "active value" — precisely the kind of information to which strategic business apps will increasingly need access. Shift in PrioritiesThe cost of raw storage, of course, has been dropping steadily for some time; the Berkeley team estimates that a gigabyte of magnetic disk will cost $1 by 2005. Even so, because of the costs associated with managing those assets and ensuring their availability, storage management is now the biggest line item in many IT budgets. If that's the case, then crafting a strategic approach to storage management — one that reduces costs and increases revenue opportunities — is a highly intelligent move. As Richard Scannell writes in this issue's cover story ("The Next IT Imperative"), strategic business applications that create intelligence from information feed on large amounts of data and thus depend on its continual availability. For that reason, intelligent enterprises, which rely heavily on such applications for competitive advantage, can achieve even more advantage by treating storage management assets as strategic infrastructure in itself. That implies, says Scannell, that you manage those assets centrally — from a policy and process, not just technology, perspective — and with a long-range view. This strategy has several components, but I want to highlight just two of them here: organizational change and reporting. As I mentioned earlier, a strategic approach to storage management implies a transition from distributed to centralized architecture. As Scannell points out, IT processes that are appropriate under the former can break down under the latter; hence, developing "organizational confidence," as he calls it, is a more important factor than technology in any strategic storage management approach. Scannell also argues that under such an approach, metrics and measurement must move beyond the Boolean variety ("backups are being completed or they're not") to embrace cost analysis. In his view, organizations have fixated on increasing storage capacity at the expense of true performance measurement for far too long. Don't Look AwaySure, data volumes are expanding rapidly. But if you think the solution is to simply "buy more disk," then you're setting yourself up for failure. Rather, strategic business apps demand a strategic approach to storage.
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