More ‘Intimacy’ With Information Required
More ‘Intimacy’ With Information Required
September 27, 2006: Phillip Sargeant, Vice President for Gartner Global Storage Team, says it’s not how we store content, but how we manage it that will be the primary focus in the future
Speaking at the 2nd Annual Storage Networking World in Sydney, Phillip addressed his concerns regarding the growing amount of information troubling organisations today.
“Information is going to grow, we are going to want to manage that information far more economically then we do today,” said Phillip. “It is going to become harder and harder to manage, to disparate information that is everywhere.”
With an audience of approximately 300 in front of him, Phillip gave compelling advice on the amount of options for information storage and the need to understand the information itself more intimately. “Don’t simply throw hardware at the problem,” he said. “Consider where you can economically store it…Look at the storage management more so then you look at the hardware.”
In discussing the need to effectively manage information, Phillip also stressed the emerging pressures of compliance with reference to the recovery time objective (RTO.) “It may not have bitten you at this point in time, but it will in a few years,” he said. “The focus will be more on recovery and not necessarily backup.”
Philip also stressed the need for organisations to look at tiered storage as a means to dealing with the growth-rate of data. “If you haven’t started looking at tiered storage, you need to do so,” he said. “Why should I have it? It’s obvious when you look at the price range.”
Suggesting that most organisations will have some facets of multi-storage in the next few years, Phillip urged his audience to be careful of the number of tiers they put in place and consider what such storage can actually achieve. “Even with tiered storage, you are not going to be able to store all that information.”
Ray Dunn, Vice Chairman of the SNIA Board USA, agreed with Phillip’s take on information. “It is the information that is important, not necessarily the hardware and software,” he said.