What Elephant?

Time was, a company's storage strategy consisted of cutting a yearly check to EMC, Hitachi or IBM and taking delivery of storage hardware that then got shackled to the corporate servers. It was simple and predictable.

But that was before companies faced the need to double their storage capacity every six to 12 months. That was before Sept. 11 cast the need for reliable data backup into high relief, and before companies realized that they needed to interconnect isolated pools of storage in order to maximize ROI from expensive ERP, CRM and e-business systems. Before the worldwide storage capacity swells from 283,000 terabytes in 2000 to more than 5 million terabytes by 2005, as Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn., predicts.

Once an oxymoron, storage strategy is starting to get the attention it deserves, driven in part by cost. CIO's exclusive survey "Managing Storage" (conducted in February 2002) found that on average 22 percent of a company's total IT budget will be allocated to storage this year (some analysts estimate that the budget bite can go as high as 50 percent). More than half of the survey respondents said that senior management is paying more attention to storage now. With that kind of scrutiny, smart CIOs will have to figure out how to cheaply and effectively manage their portion of that 5 million terabyte elephant.

The good news is that the exponential growth in data has led to a corresponding surge in technologies and tactics that will eventually help CIOs manage storage across the entire company. The bad news is that that array of choices has transformed storage management into an increasingly complex topic. So this is a good time to take stock of where you are--and begin developing the strategies that can help you get to where you want to be in the future.

Who Brought That Elephant in Here?