Better things to do

Most experts agree that users shouldn't be left to dream up ways to use all of the storage space at their disposal, nor should they have to fret over the prospect of running out of capacity. "A scientist should never have to worry about how much storage space they have available," says Peter Herrin, a systems analyst at Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc., a cancer drug discovery and development company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Infinity installed 3PAR's InServ S800 storage server in January 2003. Like Ask.com, Infinity made use of the vendor's Thin Provisioning and Virtual Copy options, which took the burden off Infinity officials who were constantly trying to ensure that drug researchers would have enough storage.

"The real trick as far as storage projection goes is priming the pipeline as a particular drug moves from the research to the clinical trial stage," says John Keilty, Infinity's director of informatics. "Our challenges surround both the volume of data we have and its complexity. For instance, when researching a particular drug, a scientist can be working with hundreds of thousands of molecules that make up a protein associated with a certain type of cancer. This means millions of data points. Storage issues are further complicated by the fact that we must accommodate many, many images of these molecules, so we are talking terabytes of data."

Though not always as dramatic as the storage needs of researchers pursuing new cancer treatments, users in many vertical industries truly require vast volumes of capacity to help accomplish their company's mission. Yet how fast must this space be made available? This is a key question to fend off storage hogging, experts agree.