Decisions - Data storage - Waste of space.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Gary Flood.

Computer data storage is in a mess. There has been a proliferation of ways to store data as the demand to keep more and more of it on file has grown. The University of California believes as much data will be created in the next three years as in the previous 40,000 put together, yet we're not even using the systems already in place efficiently. Hitachi Data Systems estimates that for every GBP 1 a company spends buying storage hardware, it will end up spending an extra GBP 15 managing it.

And Hitachi is not kidding about that under-use. Ian Lockhart, strategic project manager for the Ideal Enterprise Solutions arm of value-added reseller Ideal Hardware, says underuse is as high as 40-50% in some audits his company has undertaken. Judi Feeley, UK general manager for storage software vendor Veritas, puts it at 30-40%. Simon Gay, storage practice leader at services company Computacenter, says it may be as high as 80% for non-mainframe systems. And Jyoti Banerjee, head of consultancy Imago, which surveyed 200 UK companies of over GBP 10m revenue, found that 75% admit they are using less than 60% of their capacity, but around 60% say they still expect to increase storage purchasing.

However, before you bend your IT director's ear, read on. There are some valid reasons for this unused capacity. The end of the 1980s saw the spread of IT outside the traditional mainframe. Computers began to be used in branch offices, then departments, and finally appeared on nearly everyone's desk. Then they had to be linked back to those mainframes so data could be moved around, which ended up with a consultant's dream and a maintenance nightmare - the so-called client/server revolution. Though this revolution had many benefits, it has also meant that IT is now out of the tight control of a central IT team, and all those scattered servers have ended up having their own discrete memory and storage requirements.

Part of the problem is that the price of storage - ie, disks - has fallen, so companies have bought more and more of them. But there is a false economy, argues Gay. "You can chuck more hardware at the problem, but even if its cost is falling the total cost of ownership is going up through higher costs of back-up, administration, power, warranty, support and even floor-space rent, if you're based in a city like London."

The IT industry is responding with two initiatives: new ...