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.