Storage growth is an accepted fact within our industry and Moore's law is absolutely applicable with a doubling of storage needs every 18 months. With disk capacity also increasing exponentially this might not look like such a big issue. But if you consider that 80% of the total storage costs is administration it's easy to see that this is something worth taking a closer look at.

The graph , plotting the storage growth rates seen at a large European banking corporation, shows that the expected growth [grey] was relatively moderate with a 70% year-on-year increase. After running an initial clean-up that removed 30% of non-work related files, the banking corporation put a system of disk quotas and file block in place to permanently reduce and control data growth. This coupled with informing the users of their individual usage through an end-user portal meant that the storage growth year-over-year could effortlessly be decreased to 40%. The values shown in orange describe the effectiveness of the storage policies put in place.

With intelligent management of your storage resources, the cost savings will increase over time. By year five the factor between uncontrolled storage needs and controlled needs is almost four. Data management policies will not only prolong the life span of your existing hardware infrastructure but continuously save you money on administration, every year and every quarter.

Download Northern's White Paper about how Northern Storage Suite can delivers financial returns in three ways: by improving utilization of existing resources, by reducing the pace of hardware investment and by reducing the need for administrative intervention in data management.