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What are the immediate challenges for CIOs on the storage front?
Today, the most difficult task for the storage administrators or CIOs is to plan for enterprise-wide storage needs. This is because of the information explosion that is taking place due to increasing number of e-channels that connect to corporate data centers and other business continuity imperatives. Thus, data storage is becoming a major component in the enterprise IT budgets, consuming up to 30% of the capital IT infrastructure costs. Plus, the data volumes that businesses are supposed to handle are unpredictable. Either the storage systems are scarce to handle the peak-period information load or they stay underutilized during off-peak situations. So, CIOs are looking for optimization options to fully utilize their storage gear with the objective to minimize operational costs. Technology selection for future information needs, handling heterogeneous platforms, combating storage outages, and end user orientation, are among the other challenges.

What is the extent of data explosion happening for which companies need to be ready?
As the data-hungry applications like ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, etc. are increasing in the corporate world, there's a huge volume of data that either exists on storage systems or flow through the corporate networks. This data is also related to millions of consumers and can be in audio or video formats also. To estimate the volume of data explosion, it's said that it took the entire period of humanity through 1999 to accumulate 12 exabytes (10^18) of information. However, by the middle of 2002 the second dozen exabytes were created. And today there's nearly 300 MB for every person on earth. So much so that the data volume, which is generally measured in gigabyte (10^9) or terabyte (10^12), will soon be frequently measured in petabyte (10^15), exabytes (10^18) or higher units.

How do enterprises optimize information management costs?
One-size-fits-all approach is no more applicable for corporate data centers. Now storage vendors are promoting tiered solutions that take care of enterprise needs based on the business value of information. These solutions range from simple backup and recovery to disaster recovery (DR) for local and remote business locations. So user companies need to invest more for high-end solutions that cater to their critical information protection needs. For mundane applications (estimated 90% of the information is hardly used after 90 days), they can deploy low-cost storage systems. The concept that deals with tiered storage is referred as information lifecycle management (ILM).

Are there some pressing issues like compliance for which storage managers should get prepared?
Yes, compliance can provide necessary impetus to user companies to deploy cost-effective, yet robust, systems that could help them store and retrieve large volumes of data. But compliance requirements, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as such are not posing any immediate challenge in India. Still, companies need to make long-term plans to protect structured database information and unstructured data that comes in the form of e-mails, messages, etc. Since most companies are now introducing automated voice response systems to handle customer queries, etc., they need to save even the audio files for future reference.

How is the SMB market evolving in terms of using data management solutions?
Most SMBs have been mainly dependent on rigidly designed direct-attached storage (DAS) solutions including SCSI, external serial ATA, USB, and so on. However, now they're in the process of deploying networked storage solutions because of falling prices and vendors' increasing focus on the SMB segment. The new storage products use technologies such as iSCSI and Fiber Channel, offering more flexibility and scalability options to SMBs.

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