But what is it we`re storing?

People approach packing in different ways (I`m referring to holidaying and moving house). I`ve seen packers in action who possess the eerie ability to get everything in, never mind creaking chassis or fatigued shock absorbers, and with sentimentality leaving no regard for cost. I`ve also seen others just throw the stuff out. Never the twain shall meet, you say? I don`t know. Somewhere in the middle there must be a better solution.

Never has it been easier to determine the value of data. All you have to do is think about the cost of losing it.

Carel Alberts, technology editor, ITWeb

The same holds true for data storage and backup. There`s a lot of it out there. The Butler Group has estimated that 67% of IT budgets will be spent on data storage this year. Gartner Report (2001) states that storage requirements double every year.

Remember the guy in the folk tale who specified payment in grains of wheat, suggesting a calculation method starting with one on the first square of the chessboard, and doubling the number for every square until the 64^th? Similarly, exponential increase of data every year quickly amounts to huge amounts. And nobody likes to lose any of it. So what do you do?

There is always hardware. Dataquest reports that 1.9 million servers were sold last year. But the scary thing is they were probably bought with on-server storage in mind. IT budgets, say those who know, don`t yet provide for storage area network or network-attached storage systems, thought too expensive. One reason for buying all this hardware is the under-utilisation of storage equipment, mostly to help prevent system failure.

I should point out that, before you throw more hard drives at the problem, vendors make millions out of terabyte-capacity storage devices.

Much better to try a managed approach, enabling a selection of what data is stored or backed up, making better use of current capacity and giving you the option of technologies that will save you time and money. The need for a managed approach is most often arrived at by asking yourself these questions: Does all of it really have to go in? Isn`t some of the stuff a duplication of other data on your system? Does it all have to go in this very day? Is the car boot/server/tape library the best place for it?

Source Consulting, a storage company responsible for some very scary statistics, points out that 68% of file server data have not been accessed on average for the last 90 days, that 22% of open systems data are duplicated, and that 51% are redundant.

Hierarchical storage management (HSM), a concept dating back to mainframe days, is a policy-based storage procedure that can take care of unused data by migrating it from the HSM server onto secondary storage, leaving primary storage free for more current data.

Users gain access to this data by clicking on a placeholder file icon, and re-migrating files to primary storage as needed. This approach has the obvious benefits of using hardware resources more efficiently, saving money and time on hardware and backup time and increasing server performance.

The applications are widespread. Many companies these days have contact centres. Voice-recordings take up a lot of space, as do medical records (that have to be stored for 10 years) and company financial records which must be kept on file for three to five years.

When it comes to the most immediate experience of storage and backup for users, the desktop and mobile environment, there are statistics and strategies that you should take cognisance of as well, all of which will prevent headaches.

According to the IDC, 60% of the intellectual capital of enterprises resides on remote drives (high-level mobile workers). Between 60% and 80% of data resides on PC hard drives. Less than 4% of people perform regular backups. Never has it been easier to determine the value of data. All you have to do is think about the cost of losing it.

Technologies like single-instance storage - another concept that isn`t new - may provide an answer to time-consuming and space-hungry backups of multiple mobile users backing up the same file, along with their changes. First checking what files are on the server, a backup or save will only save changes to the original document, and not the entire document in multiple processes.

If you have been "solving" your burgeoning storage problems by adding to the server farm, or you`re unhappy with the administration and implementation costs or inflexibility of your tape solution, help is at hand. And it`s in the form of making better use of current infrastructure, always a winner in the financial director`s book. Perhaps it`s time for another presentation by your solution provider.