"We use ILM to some extent. Certain applications need high performance disks, and some are less critical but need a near-online response, while other data are not so critical," said Norris Hickerson, VP, data centre & engineering services, COL. "The main problems for Hong Kong users, especially small companies, is that they can define data tiers, but they may not have enough data volume at every tier to make ILM effective."

ILM helps organizations lower their effective hardware costs as well as the total cost of ownership of storage. "ILM is being implemented fairly well in Hong Kong," said Li, "However, many of the existing practices are applying ILM at the application level and not at the information level. Symantec affords organizations the ability to manage information from the time it's created, until it is archived to tape for long term storage and eventually retired."

One emerging trend is increased use of multimedia, where industries involved in video and digital entertainment media are seeing exponential growth of storage demand. "Some businesses operate almost 24 hours and it is difficult to find time for backup," said Lo, "More important is an emerging need for continuous data protection. As a result, real-time, disk-to-disk synchronized backup is growing globally."

Virtualization and autonomic provisioning

"We are seeing increased adoption of storage virtualization in both mainframe and open systems environments," said Sun's Lin. "This is driven by IT shops which need to manage up to tenfold more data with the same number of staff."