We (Patrick and Bruce) are new to ISSJ. In a future article, you'll learn more about who we are and why we are here. In this issue, we thought we would take a minute to frame some of the discussions that will go on throughout the year.

As you probably all know from first-hand experience, storage is the fastest growing and probably the most expensive resource on your network. With recent legislation concerning privacy, security, and financial reporting - hundreds of laws in all - storage must now be one of the most carefully managed resources on your network. You have two important reasons why you must do a good job: financial and legal.

While disk drives may be cheap, the cost of installing new storage and maintaining what you've got is not. In fact, industry analysts say you will spend three to five times your hardware acquisition costs maintaining that storage over its lifetime. We watch people put lots of effort into the economics of their purchases; we see much less effort put into cost of ownership.

To gain control of your operating costs, you have to gain control of what is going on with your information resources. This is only logical, right? How many of us have control - any amount of control?

If you had control, what would you do? You might classify the data and then provide different levels of service to different classes of information...critical data gets careful (read expensive) handling; less critical data gets less expensive treatment. Brilliant! (Obvious?) Can you do this with the infrastructure you have today? Are you positioned to do it tomorrow?

Industry analysts also tell us that much of the data on our networks is junk. (How much? Thirty to forty percent.) Do you have the infrastructure in place to sweep the junk out of the environment? Probably not, but it's worth a year and half of growth in terms of space utilization based on the fact that these same analysts tell us that the storage needs of most networks are growing at 18-25% a year.

As we go forward, we will tell you about some of the clever things people are doing to meet their legal obligations and reduce their operating costs. We will give you a sense of what is real and what is not. For example, the first thing you need to manage anything is control. If you don't have the policies and technology in place to control your storage use, complicated conversations about compliance aren't worth the time. You won't be able to do anything with the answer. If you are talking compliance and you don't have control - stop talking! Go get the technology that gives you control.

If you have control, you need classification. Not all information is the same. No one can afford the cost of treating all data as though it were mission critical. Classification is an emerging area for storage management technology. But let's take one of the myths off the table right now.

Retrospective classification - classifying the data that is already on your network - can only be done with the metadata attributes that are already there. If an attribute was not attached to this data when it was created, you can't afford the cost of figuring out what is missing. For those of you who are older, this harkens back to the old economics of system conversions. How much does it cost to move data from one system to another? Pretty much whatever it cost to create the data in the first place. Same deal with retrospective classification. How much does it cost to add classification attributes that are not there already? About as much as it cost to create the data in the first place. No one can afford this.

That's it for now. These are the issues we will be wrestling with in the coming months. Get on board! We hope you enjoy the ride as much as we will!