Data storage growth. Those three words have caused IT professionals many a sleepless night in recent years. Explosive data growth has lead to corresponding headaches relating to the storage, maintenance and protection of it. And here’s the REALLY bad news: it’s accelerating. Some analysts predict that file-level data will increase more than 500% in the next five years. In 2012 alone, your business will produce 10 times more data than it did five years ago, and 85% of it will never be accessed again.*
All this is occurring as businesses are increasingly asking their IT teams to do more with less, to find ways to save money in every aspect of their operations, and to justify the value of technology expenditures to the business.
New storage technologies and solutions are coming to the fore which dramatically meet these challenges, but they are not always provided by the legacy IT vendors. In fact, some of the legacy vendors have been guilty of painting racing stripes on their old solutions and calling them “new”. They are reluctant to do what Tom Peters calls “eating their children” – embracing disruptive technologies that will compete with, and eventually defeat, the beloved legacy products that have made them so successful. So instead they obfuscate, divert attention and sometimes outright mislead. This blizzard of (sometimes mis-) information can be confusing, to say the least.
More than ever, what small & medium enterprise (SME) storage customers need are trusted, seasoned advisors who see through the fog of marketing hype to get to the real business value. This is a skill; it is hard-earned, only through experience, and cannot be taught in an online certification course or vendor-sponsored class. When seeking a little clarity prior to your next storage acquisition, you would do well to seek out an industry veteran who can, pardon the expression, cut through the crap, and assist you in building a “future-proof” data storage strategy.
* TechTarget.com, 1/17/2012