Brad Wood, the senior director of enterprise technology at Corrections Corporation of America, identified a problem. “There are people out there who haven’t put in any kind of storage resource management [SRM] and they are drowning in complexity,” he told Kate Evans-Correia of ComputerWeekly.com.

Wood was apparently able to bring his company up to speed, but his next comment underlined the importance of staying on top of things. “I should have looked at SRM sooner,” he said. “[Doing it] late in the game was a bit painful.”

Charles Brown, the CIO of Fire Materials Group, made an understanding remark. “There’s so much information out there. The suppliers, the technology out there . . . the din and clutter could scare the heck out of anybody.”

One expert in the field phrased it in a somewhat less sympathetic manner. “Most midmarket CIOs don’t have the resources or expertise to dedicate to figuring out a solution,” stated Greg Schulz, the founder and a senior analyst at The StorageIO Group. “Suppliers need to help them navigate the waters,” he concluded.

Potential customers shouldn’t let cost scare them away. The longer they ignore the situation, the worse it will get. “The cost of storage can be directly related to the lack of [business continuity] planning,” according to Josh Howard, a data storage specialist at CDW.

Dealing with data storage can be troublesome, but it’s a “the sooner, the better” situation.

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Is Digital Storage Killing Itself?

Either way, it remains an undisputed fact that people are storing more data than ever before, and that storage devices are continually increasing in capacity and/or decreasing in price.

Bob Schultz, senior vice president and manager of Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks group, spoke to the Associated Press. “Ten years ago, a 1-gigabyte disk drive was a really great thing,” he said. “Last Christmas, I bought a 1-gigabyte memory stick for my daughter’s camera. I suppose it cost $5,000 a decade ago for that disk drive, and I think the memory stick cost me $50.” And that, in a nutshell, is the trend.

Some think this pattern could continue until data storage vendors are squeezed up against their profit margins. Joe Tucci of the storage company EMC Corp was also quoted in the Associated Press article. “If I only have hardware and I just keep helping make you more and more efficient at less and less cost, eventually I’m going to hit a wall and it’s going to be tough for me to make money.”

But many people in the industry think that the moneymaking will carry on as usual. Entertainment-related files, including music, videos, and games, have exponentially increased the demand for data storage, and that’s just one category of data. Financial figures, medical information, and all other sorts of things are being committed to digital memory. This need is maintaining data storage profits, in spite of rising capacities and diving prices.

It seems like a fairly safe bet that the industry will remain profitable, at least for some time. Investors still might want to keep an eye out for the tipping point, though.

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