On the up and up

The storage hardware market is being boosted by international compliance regulations, increased information volumes and hierarchical schemes to manage those volumes.

In a recent interview, Bill Watkins, CEO of hard drive manufacturer Seagate, was refreshingly candid about storage. "Let's face it; we're not changing the world," he told Fortune's senior editor Jeffrey O'Brien. "We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Traditional ILM only marginally addressed data security.

Manfred Gramlich, storage practice expert, Sun Microsystems

Clearly, being in the storage business is still profitable for some vendors. As more of the world's information is digitised and as more digital data gets produced, so companies and individuals are buying more disk space to store, back up or archive it.

The market figures are illustrative. IDC says the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) disk storage systems market was 8.5% up during the third quarter of 2006 over the same period in 2005, pushing the value to over $2.2 billion. Capacity consumption - the actual amount of raw storage sold - increased almost 40% to 225.8 petabytes.

According to Eric Sheppard, a storage expert from IDC in Europe, a great deal of this capacity consumption in larger environments has been driven by a desire to reduce or control storage-related costs.

"This is driving spending on solutions that enable increased efficiencies like externally attached networked disk storage systems or disk-based backup and recovery," he says.

Worldwide figures are also up. Gartner says worldwide external controller-based disk storage revenue totalled $3.7 billion in the third quarter of 2006, up over 7% over the same period in 2005. The industry showed a dramatic increase in the sale of add-on storage capacity compared with the sale of new units.

The operating system will definitely change in a 10-year period, further complicating matters.

Paul Mullon, information governance executive, Metrofile

Gartner analysts say the majority of the capacity growth is the result of buyer compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, requiring not only data retention but retrieval as well. Compliance with regulations, more awareness of backup and recovery, controlling of costs and high-level approaches to storage such as information lifecycle management (ILM) are the current drivers for storage purchases. And SA is no different.

ILM, as formally defined by the Storage Network Industry Association, comprises the "policies, processes, practices and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition".

This is nothing new or particularly IT-focused: organisations dealing with microfilm, paper records and tape recordings have been using ILM practices for many years. In the storage world, these translate into tiers of storage with varying levels of access time, capacity and cost.

"Tiered storage allows clients to optimise their spend and protect data according to its value and required accessibility," says Mike Sewell, group executive for outsourcing at Business Connexion. "Clients using storage capacity provided in this manner have the ability to access 10% more capacity immediately, literally at the touch of a button."

Storage-on-demand serves as a useful building block for services-on-demand.

Mike Sewell, group executive for outsourcing, Business Connexion

He says tenders looking for the provision of outsourced services are increasingly seeking such on-demand models for capacity delivery. "Since it is easier to understand and is proven as a concept, storage-on-demand serves as a useful building block for services-on-demand. Moving up the technology services hierarchy, it is possible to provide other services-on-demand such as CPU cycles or compound services such as e-mail or other applications."

Notably, Sewell says the vendor manufacturing the storage device is becoming increasingly immaterial to clients. "As long as the storage is housed in an appropriate data centre facility and delivers the assurance of data availability as specified in the service level agreement, the client is satisfied," he says. "As an analogy, consumers are not generally concerned about where the electricity they use was generated, be it Koeberg or a coal-fired power station."

According to Manfred Gramlich, storage practice expert at Sun Microsystems, traditional ILM has helped companies protect their data and reduce the cost of storing data.

"Traditional ILM focused on static tiers of storage," he points out. "It did not accommodate the true bi-directional nature of data access, and only marginally addressed data security. Identity-enabled ILM is a Sun initiative that controls how, and by whom, data is accessed across its lifecycle. It makes sure that data is handled appropriately and securely at every phase of the data and the user lifecycles, according to the ever-changing requirements of applications as well as regulatory agencies."

Regulation has driven much investment in storage in the last 12 months. Sagaran Naidoo, business technologist at CA Technology Services, says that while most South African companies may not yet have to comply with stringent legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the local offices of internationally affiliated organisations do.

"There are also further issues such as the Promotion of Access to Information Act, the recommendations of the King II Report and the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. The ECT Act, for example, notes that 'integrity is crucial when using electronic evidence as evidentiary weight'."

However, the issue of media choice is not so cut-and-dried when documents must be stored for 10 years, points out Paul Mullon, information governance executive at Metrofile.

"Is that long- or short-term?" he asks. "Organisations must also consider that in the 10-year period, a number of software versions will be used to read stored information. That results in formatting and conversion problems, particularly for older documents. The operating system will definitely change in a 10-year period, further complicating matters. The employees who created the storage environment and worked with the technologies will typically have moved on. Storage hardware closely follows Moore's Law, so roughly every 18 months there will be a technology refresh. While that may sound trivial, the question of document authenticity is not a trivial matter for courts of law."

It's a small wonder then that large enterprises are looking to control their storage-related costs.