Indiscriminate archiving putting storage beyond reach

storage: Management costs spiral out of control as users warned to develop archive strategies

Storage costs will spiral "out of control" unless network managers work out what sort of data they want to keep and what they can discard.

Lack of standards, slow adoption of hardware management tools and non-existent archiving policies to limit the volume of data has made storage the most expensive element in the IT budget.

Abby Ewen, IT manager at solicitors Withers, estimated that "Ninety per cent of the three million text documents we have stored could be thrown away." A retrospective cleaning-up exercise was, she argued, too expensive, leaving her stuck with unimportant documents for the legal preservation term of 15 years. She is now looking at a tool that lets a lawyer indicate a document's importance at its creation or after closing a deal.

Ewen already archives fax documents, but said this only helped slightly. "Electronic faxes are Tif files - these are too large and we haven't got the space," she said. "We now delete older ones, but we're probably deleting more than we should."

Bob Plumridge at storage supplier Hitachi argued that storage costs could become unaffordable.

"Intelligence is most lacking," he said, arguing that instead of pushing all online data to storage, users should develop archive policies for which data should be kept.

"Hardware is relatively cheap, but the cost of management will go out of control," he said. "Every pound spent on hardware needs seven on storage management."