Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

COMPANIES FACE RADICALLY DIFFERENT STO MGMT MARKET IN 2003

A new Yankee Group report, "Storage Management Strategy is an Enterprise Priority in 2003," says companies must implement effective storage-management strategies to support increasing volumes of data, which the Yankee Group predicts will continue to grow over the next 5 years. A clear theme for 2003 is the role storage-management applications play in helping administrators manage storage, prompting new strategies to identify and map application requirements at the storage system level. It also marks the first year storage management regains some momentum after a 2-year slowdown in deployments.

"This year there will be several significant changes for the storage-management market. Customer adoption of policy-based management tools, especially storage provisioning, storage resource management, and management consoles, will accelerate as customers look to more efficiently manage their storage environments," says Jamie Gruener, Yankee Group Enterprise Computing & Networking senior analyst. "The promise of storage-management standards and new application-centric management tools also should drive customer adoption over the next 18 months."

The Yankee Group cautions that this market remains complex. Enterprises must develop clear strategies to evaluate vendors and products based on how each will fit into a focused, inclusive management strategy. In 2003 this will prove difficult because companies face a dizzying array of choices. However, assessing what the company has in place, how data is segmented by QoS, and how fast the corporate storage environment will grow or evolve provides a good basis for an ongoing evaluation process.