All about data SANity!

Businesses are witnessing an explosion in the volume of data. Whether it is

the result of the Internet, e-mail or increasingly top-heavy and media-rich

application software, there seems to be a sudden spurt in the volume of data all

around. And it brings along a host of other problems for the CIO: data

replication, lack of cost-effective data-sharing technologies, abundance of

unattended files, and stale data that its creators use, forget about and never

delete from their disks. Conservative estimates from IDC place data growth at

approximately 80 per cent per year. From a not-so-measly 184,641 terabytes of

stored data worldwide in 1999, IDC projects that new data storage will grow to

almost 2,000,000 terabytes by 2003.

The new economy has arrived with a new generation of applications that are

data-fed, data-driven, and data-intensive. Today, no aspect of enterprise

computing deserves more attention than maintaining and storing corporate data.

According to a random survey conducted by Dataquest across 20 large

organizations, it was revealed that about 60 per cent companies were planning to

enhance their storage capacity by 25-50 per cent. CIOs are increasingly

abandoning traditional storage means that will no longer be able to handle the

mountains of data their companies generate. Topologies for storage within the

corporate IT infrastructure have proliferated. Server-attached storage (SAS) is

out; networked storage–including network-attached storage (NAS) and storage

area networks (SANs)–is in.

According to IDC worldwide, networked storage solutions will show a robust

combined annual growth rate of 67 per cent from 1999 through 2003, while the

growth rate for attached storage solutions will decrease by 3 per cent during

the same period. In 1999, only $2.2 billion of the $30 billion spent worldwide

on disk storage was spent on SAN or NAS devices, but this is shifting

dramatically now. IDC predicts that by 2003, combined NAS and SAN acquisitions

will exceed one-third of the estimated $46 billion-disk storage market.

"Till about two years ago, no one was talking about network storage and the

market was almost negligible. But things have changed dramatically over the last

few months. Every large enterprise that wants to get into high level of

computing is now interested in network storage," says Anupam Nagar, country

sales manger, storage, H-P.

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