Businesses struggle with storage management complexity

Data growth has been contributing to the complexity of storage management over the past five years, according to a recent survey.

The research, carried out by vendor StorageTek, found that 82.3 percent of the Australian and New Zealand organisations surveyed said storage management had become more complex over the past five years.

Of those surveyed, more than half said it had become 'much more complex', with three in 10 saying it had become 'a bit more complex'.

Data growth was described by 51.6 percent of respondents as contributing to the increase in storage management complexity. Diversity of platforms and choices was cited by 27.4 percent as a contributing factor, with skill and storage management issues found to be a factor by 25.8 percent of respondents.

Rob Nieboer, international storage strategist for StorageTek, said storage continued to cause headaches for organisations because it was growing faster than they were able to manage it.

"Data growth is the number one driver of storage management complexity, but organisations also have to contend with additional complexity brought on by more operating systems, more storage networking, more storage hardware and more software vendors being brought into play," Nieboer said.

"The sheer volume of data organisations need to manage is already stretching current storage management resources, and increased data growth is stretching resources even more."

Among the wishlist of how respondents would like storage to be smarter were smarter management tools, implementation of ILM strategies, and removal of vendor constraints.

StorageTek surveyed 138 large and medium sized organisations in Australia and New Zealand.