Keeping the costs of storage down

Some future trends in storage are obvious: we'll need more of it, it'll be cheaper per megabyte, and a lot of it will be virtualised.

However, despite all that cost reduction activity, the amount enterprises are spending on storage is, somewhat surprisingly, actually on the rise.

According to Gartner research VP Roger Cox, while IT budgets have remained at best flat (no news there), the percentage of that budget being spent on storage is actually on the increase.

In a presentation this week at Gartner's Infrastructure, Operations and Data Centre Summit in Sydney, Cox noted that the growth in spending is being driven by two primary factors: a massive increase in the volume of data stored, and a greater attention to the problems of managing storage (as distinct from simply providing raw capacity).

Reconciling those contradictory scenarios isn't easy for storage managers, which probably explains why there's so much evident stress on the faces of people I see at industry conferences.

Unless storage costs actually decline even faster than data volumes -- a situation we're probably not going to see in the next few years -- it's also a challenge that's not going to go away.