Without doubt, 2007 will bring more pressure related to compliance and data retention, and users will demand ever-better data access and security. Looking on the bright side, this means that storage operations are valued more than ever before. And there is a great deal of new technology available, as well as lower prices per gigabyte. Finding the ideal storage solution for your organization can be a source of great professional satisfaction.

However, many Hong Kong businesses face growing data volume and complexity without additional budgetary resources. "A joint effort of business and IT is needed to create a sustainable storage strategy, based on the business value of the data," said Betty Lin, industry solution sales country manager, Sun Microsystems Hong Kong, "As an alternative to throwing expensive disk [storage] at the data growth problem, a strategy should include technologies like storage consolidation, virtualization and centralized management, which can reduce overall cost and increase efficiency. IT executives should educate their business executives on the severity of the issue."

Currently, many organizations tend to make multiple copies of their data. "On the production database you have a live copy and one or two backups, a development copy, one offsite for data protection, and another for data mining or BI," said Graham Penn, IDC's associate VP for storage, AP, "So it's easy to start with two terabytes of data and end up with 20 terabytes spread around a global network. ILF is making organizations wake up to where their data is and how they are moving it around."

"Google and Yahoo have datacenters the size of 10-12 football fields spinning iron and the volume is growing at hundreds of terabytes a day," continued Penn. "Airlines banks and government departments are all caught up in this issue. Software is becoming a key part of managing your data. ILM is part of it, helping users to manage data and reduce costs."

In 2006, it was widely realized that the one-size-fits-all approach to storage no longer works. "Storage requirements now vary by application and even by user within an application," said Lawrence Li, Symantec's system engineering manager. "File storage for instance, has different requirements for performance, recoverability and scalability than customers facing web content, internal email, or mission critical database records."