Symantec boss tells industry to stop buying storage

In his first major address since as head of Symantec Salem told delegates that they were missing a trick by focusing on return on investment (ROI) when they should be focusing on ROY – return on yesterday.

“My key message for you today: Stop buying storage. You heard me right. Stop buying storage,” he said.

“How? Reduce the amount of information that you store in the first place, and make the storage you do have more flexible and efficient.”

He outlined four strategies to achieve this: storage resource management, thin provisioning, data deduplication and intelligent archiving.

Salem criticised hardware companies that sold storage management tools which only detected their own hardware.

Most data centres use multiple hardware manufacturers and storage managers needed to be aware of this.

Secondly storage needed to be allocated on demand rather than building large storage arrays that sit idle initially until they fill up.

Similarly, when data is deleted then servers need to be aware of this and allocate it back to a common pool.

Salem also warned about data duplication. He pointed out that a 5MB presentation in three employees inboxes, if backed up once a week, would lead to 15,600 copies in storage by the year’s end.

Finally he said archiving needs to be more intelligent, by embracing tiered storage and smarter archiving.

Salem made his speech the day after IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker found that Symantec is maintaining its position as the number two in the storage software market with 18.3 per cent of revenues compared to EMC’s 26 per cent.