BANGALORE, INDIA: The 'never-so-obvious-kind of' eagerness that of late large companies are showing in wrapping up small data storage specialisation companies – to name a few EMC-Isilon Systems, IBM-Netezza, HP-3PAR – only reaffirms the fact that the future belongs to these technologies, in order to manage the splurging data across sectors.

Sandeep K Dutta, vice president, Storage System & Technology Group, IBM, terms it 'data monster'. And this monster seems to have bitten everybody, especially the storage industry.

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Sandeep feels that printed manuals will soon thin out and videos will take their place instead, as means of data dissemination. According to him, videos will be the next wave of pressure on storage industry.

“As the storage requirements grow, it puts a lot of pressure on the back-end, because storage resources are not growing at the same pace. In 2009, most of the companies were holding back from spending on storage. Today, although they have opened up, the spending is still a little more than what they were two years back. So the budgets haven't grown in accordance with the growth of storage requirement,” he notes.

Sandeep was talking to Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran recently in an interview to CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: So what is the kind of situation that CIOs are in today?

Sandeep K Dutta: Today, with the advent of various technologies and business growth, storage is growing exponentially. It is found that for every e-mail sent, about 121 times it gets stored on your primary storage system. However, CIOs are clueless and don't know how to manage this growth.

They are not in a situation to even figure out the kind of data that is lying inside their data centres, which is, in turn, affecting their storage forecasting.

Moreover, companies have been adding storage devices over the years, and today they find that Terabytes worth of their data sits on various kind of storage systems, such as IBM, VMware, EMC, etc. Manging different kind of storage environments brings in the next challenge that the CIOs find themselves in.

CIOL: So how can one sort out these issues?

Sandeep: The answer to all these issues is efficient storage management. Companies must store only what is absolutely necessary for their production system. They have to sort out applications which are very critical and should be saved on their primary network.

Once the companies are able to restrict their primary storage, it will help them to manage, forecast and back-up storage better.