Storage Growth Creates Management Challenges
On-line storage capacity continues to grow at an exponential rate. For the past 40 years on-line storage capacity has increased at approximately 40 percent per year compound growth rate.  Various consulting groups have stratified annual storage growth by type as follows:

Enterprise    20-25%

Mid Range    50-55%

Low End        80-85%

Overall         45%

As more new applications come on line, the demand will continue to accelerate. New applications, such as storing of photographs, and other non-coded information, will keep storage needs on a rapid growth rate for the foreseeable future.

 
With 45% of the firms having more than 1000TB (1 Petabyte) of storage, it becomes obvious that the storage growth continues.

What is your biggest storage management problem?
In another survey, when asked the question, “What is your biggest storage management problem?” system administrators responded as shown below. Managing disk space is the most often mentioned, followed by running out of disk space.

Adding to this list would be concerns about life cycle management and regulatory requirements.

Primary Goals of Storage Management
Critical data must be made available to the user on demand. It must be protected from loss and the data that must be kept for long periods of time needs to be archived. All of this in an environment that is getting more complex and has little tolerance for downtime.

The old way
As the cost per megabyte of disk storage plummeted, the great temptation was to respond to the needs for managing the data explosion which demanded 24x7 access was to add more hard drives, or another or larger server. This choice is short sighted, since it results in increasing manpower costs, increasing cost of ownership, and multiplies the management problems.

The new way

Understanding the basics are vital.  You need information in order to manage. 

1.       How many files are duplicates?

2.       How recently have files been accessed?

(As much as 70% of your disk space may be taken up by inactive files according to Peripheral Strategies study)

3.       Who are the largest space users and why?

4.       How important is this data to the business?

5.    Do I have undesired file types in the storage space?

6.     Is disk space allocated in accordance with business objectives?  

7.     What are disk usage trends?

8.     At current usage rates, when do I need to add more disk space?

FileWizard provides information to help you manage your storage space.

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