'Storage is about business intelligence and continuity'

"Storage is not just about data management anymore. Today it is increasingly a question of business intelligence, as in how much you can protect the data generated in your company and one of business continuity, as in how much you can ensure better data recovery in case of disaster," said Arun Bhagat, vice chairman, southern region, MAIT and general manager "� resource management, Acer India.

He was addressing an audience of CIOs at the National Conference on Storage Consolidation "� Best Business Practices organised by MAIT here on Wednesday. The one day conference elaborates on the benefits and necessity of a storage architecture and the increasing need to manage and integrate them better with the larger IT infrastructure.

"When you acquire storage the most important criterion to consider is the management of them. If you neglect that, even with the presence of other advantages the infrastructure can get overloaded by cost," said V Vivekanan, sales director-SAM, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems.

Elaborating on the steps organisations should take to ensure better consolidation of storage in their environments, he added that companies should work to prevent storage from acting as "isolated islands of intelligence" and should put in place a "centralised consistent intelligence" instead.

Ranganath Sadasiva, business manager, storage works division, HP India pointed out that more data will be created in the next three years than in the past 40,000 years to take total volume to 57 million TB.

Even as the challenges in storage grow, he said that disk drive uses will change and it will replace tape for applications which require faster recovery. He added that tape will evolve to become an archiving medium.

He also spoke at length on trends in information management including re-centralisation of data management.