Storage expenditures are rising, and are outpacing overall IT budgets, the survey also finds. A majority of data managers and professionals, in fact, believe storage costs are cutting into funding for other IT initiatives, particularly in an era in which organizations are looking to IT capabilities to support business growth and innovation. More than three-fifths admit that their continuing investment in storage capacity—just to keep up with rising data volumes—is restricting other initiatives within their IT departments.
A majority of respondents address the data storage challenge by purchasing and installing more hardware, but there is widespread realization that smarter approaches are needed. Seventy percent indicate that they add more disk capacity to existing NAS and SAN devices (70%), or more hardware, such as additional SAN and NAS devices (44%).
“Smarter” efforts to manage storage still not in wide use
“Smarter” efforts to manage storage are still not in wide use. For example, only 27% of respondents indicate they have adopted a tiered storage architecture, and 25% are pursuing data compression as an approach. Another 19% say they have implemented a formal information lifecycle management process.
Cloud-based remedies are even farther out, the survey finds. Only 9% of respondents are looking at private cloud storage as a mechanism for managing enterprise storage, and only 5% use the services of outside cloud providers—at least formally.
An increasing amount of time is being spent on the “nuts-and-bolts” of storage—managing, configuring, and tuning storage systems in Oracle Database environments. Data managers and professionals feel they do not have enough visibility into the application-to-database and data storage environments to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.