Looking beyond maintenance. (First In/First Out).

Those who have kept an eye on the mass-storage industry over the past several years agree on a number of trends. First, and most obvious, the amount of data to manage is growing at a rate never anticipated 10 years ago. Overall, there is something like 12EB out there. That's 12 x 10 to the 18th. Many IT managers who had to manage tens of gigabytes now will have to manage tens of terabytes. And petabytes are next; in some places, petabytes are now.

One of the other trends widely discussed is the call to make digital data more useful. Rather than merely providing departments with reports to keep everything straight, data is expected to be used strategically as a corporate asset. Industry luminary Jon Toigo suggests that a company can identify a 100MB data store that is worth a million dollars to the corporation.

Well, the observers are batting about .500. Yes, digital data is growing at challenging, in some cases alarming, rates. But not all data is being used strategically... not even close.

Why? Money, of course. Corporate enterprises, more interested in the short term than going the distance, have allowed IT budgets to slip 3-4% per year over the past couple of years. The IT community is expected to accomplish more with fewer resources.

Those who live in the real world of IT listen to this fantasy in considerable distress. They have had to settle for a minimalist strategy, where the best they can do is maintain the level of services already offered. And what does this mean? It means delaying the purchase of new servers, even if they will not have the functionality to grow with the organization. Countless PCs this year will not be able to run the latest version of Windows, sacrificing productivity on the altar of Doing More With Less.

In storage, it means adding storage a disk or tape drive at a time. Those companies doing this will learn that daisy-chaining has diminishing returns in terms of throughput. It also means that the warfare over disk versus tape pricing will continue unabated (see Fred Moore's discussion of this topic in the November 2002 issue of CTR).

A fundamental change is necessary in the way business looks at IT spending. While capital development components have traditionally been characterized as permanent and/or long term additions to the enterprise, the rapid rate of technological change no longer supports this characterization. It is now generally recognized that most investments made in information technology capital improvements will be obsolete and need updating long before they are totally paid for.

In the past, the acquisition of all hardware was considered to fall under capital development. However, with the paradigm shift to and reliance on desktop computing, many enterprises must shift funding for the computer workstation, associated software and connectivity to the operating budget of individual departments and cost centers. Regardless of the funding source, the total cost of ownership must be considered when determining priorities and when establishing both capital and operating budgets for information technology standards, systems and tools.

Computers and the storage subsystems that support them have become such an integral part of the workplace that it is increasingly hard to remember the daily routine when a handful of typewriters still clung to their position as a primary medium of communication. Technology investment-in network infrastructures, desktop communication tools, and scalable storage architectures- can send a clear message these days about where a business is headed and where it fits in the competitive landscape.

Maintenance is not enough and cannot be enough in a competitive business environment. Businesses must spend on IT, or face mediocrity at best or disaster at worst.