All enterprises are struggling with storage growth. Most have responded by constantly adding more disk-based storage. This "heroin to the addicts" approach will inevitably fail. The vendor-promised approach – Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) – is still more of a marketing concept than product or approach. IT managers must attack the exponential growth rate of storage where the problem is most acute: network shares.

The Culprits: E-mail and File Shares

A common response to the rapid growth of information is to buy more storage. Disk is cheap. Unfortunately, storage management is very expensive. Storage growth leads to a wide variety of IT problems. The most common include:

• Decreased backup windows.
• Litigation and compliance risks due to unmanaged content.
• Increased operational costs.

For more information on the problems of simply adding disk, refer to the Info-Tech Advisor research note, "More Storage, Less Fulfilling."

The root of these problems is the exponential growth of files within...