Do storage managers have a “pack rat” mentality?
Yes – if you ask the folks over at Symantec, according to their recent “Symantec Top 9 storage trends for 2010″ published recently. Well, I beg to differ. It’s not the storage admins, but rather the end-users that ’suffer’ from a “pack rat” mentality!
This has to do with the ‘custodian-owner gap’ that exists in IT. The owners of the data are the end-users representing the different business units. The IT pros in general, and more specifically the storage admins are the custodians of the data. The storage admin is tasked with making sure that the data is accessible to the business users & applications according to need. It could be online,near-line or off-line, but it needs to be accessible with the right response time etc. It’s not only that the storage admin can not delete data because of not knowing in most cases it’s relevance and context, but neither will the end-users themselves be easily able to actually delete data. The typical line of reasoning goes something like: “Those planning spreadsheet for that big engineering project that got shelved a year ago, is this something I can delete? I think I might need them, maybe, sometime in the future”.
So, will Data continue to grow in 2010? yes it will. Will storage admins all of a sudden begin to delete data? I don’t believe they will. So how should storage admins deal with the explosive data growth and shrinking budgets? they really have two options:
1. Delete Junk data
2. Archive ‘least frequently’ used data onto less expensive storage tier (maybe even a cloud storage archive).
The first thing one needs to be able to do in order to achieve one of the two is to get an inventory of the data assets, understand what file resources there are, hopefully in a visually interactive manner that will enable the storage admin to take quick actions. Easily identifying where those JPEGs are, which of the users is the biggest storage hog etc. There’s a plethora of free ‘File Resource Management’ applications out there that will let the storage admin figure these questions out.
Happy Holidays!
