The annual rate of consumption growth of data quoted by storage manufacturers can vary, but is typically seen to be around 150%, yet what of your own company? Simply by examining the impact of email to a company’s IT department may be enough on its own. Gartner predicts that through 2005 the number and size of emails will continue to rise at an annual growth of 40%.

If we were to believe everything we read over the past couple of years, it would have been forgivable to think that the growth within the storage market was to be by far the largest explosion in the short history of the Information Technology Industry. As every IT company worth its salt climbed aboard the storage bandwagon, it has started to become clear that it is the technology which is being sold first, whilst the real reason for ensuring a cost effective and efficient storage infrastructure seems to have been lost on the way.

As the amount of data in your organisation grows so do the associated costs - Management, DR, Backup etc. But it’s not just the financial impact of continual storage investment. Day-to-day issues arise  and also start to increase. Such issues can develop in various ways, incomplete backups, increased data administration, extra disk purchases - not to mention the time taken to investigate the failures.

Being in control of the data, it becomes nigh on impossible to keep track of what's taking up space, what to archive and what to remove altogether. By using an effective storage resource management solution, it becomes a simple process to get you data to make sense.

An effective storage management program can be integrated into your system in a relatively short period of time, allowing you to easily optimise your heterogeneous Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and Storage Area Networks (SAN)-including multi-vendor environments. SRM has strong management and powerful reporting capabilities allowing you to analyse trends, manage, report and schedule networked storage resources across distributed and centralised environments in the enterprise.

Once you understand your storage resources, it will allow you to reduce operating costs, speed application development, and allow you to cope with infrastructure changes. Through better management you can free up disk space allowing you to 'recycle' the storage rather than 'investing' in new storage space, giving you a better return on investment.

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