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Solving The Storage Riddle: Page 2 of 5

Demand Drivers, bar chartOther factors driving demand for storage services include regulatory compliance, information-life-cycle management, security, and storage on demand. In a survey of storage professionals that Gartner conducted in August, 69% cite compliance as the No. 1 driver, followed by information-life-cycle management (56%), security (44%), and storage on demand (31%).

Storage on demand has emerged as a growth area. Several of the survey respondents report that 70% of the storage they provision in 2008 will be purchased on a usage basis, and outsourcers are adding storage-on-demand services. These utilities are being built around tiers of storage for backup and primary disk storage so different tiers can be assigned based on the business value of the data.

Pay Per Use
Many service providers have entered the market. MCI, which is being acquired by Verizon Communications Inc., in September launched Utility Storage Service, a pay-as-you-go service model, at the heart of which is a Client Central portal where customers can view attached servers, track volumes, monitor utilization, and add, move, and delete storage capacity. "The service allows customers to plug into a shared storage fabric on a per-gigabyte, per-month basis," says Rick Dyer, director of product management at MCI's enterprise hosting services.

The MCI service alerts customers when their capacity threshold is reached, letting them request additional storage. MCI also provides back-end capacity-storage management and planning, including storage area network discovery and path management, performance and event management, and file-system-level storage-resource management.

Professional storage services can be critical in linking storage infrastructure decisions to business requirements. HIP Health Plan of New York, the largest HMO in the New York area, contracted with GlassHouse Technologies Inc. to create a road map for storage that would let it deal with myriad regulatory issues, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. "GlassHouse conducted a thorough analysis of our storage needs and developed an architectural blueprint," says Tom Ko, HIP's director of data-center operations.