UC impact on storage

If you’re rolling out UC, one thing you may not have considered is its impact on storage. The amount of storage any given organization manages is tied directly to its size: large companies (by annual revenue those above $1 billion) average on the order of 1 Petabyte of data; midsize companies ($300 million to $1 billion) average on the order of 100 Terabytes (more than $1 billion), and small companies average on the order of 10T of data. However, small companies expect mean storage growth of 42% in 2009 and 26% in 2010, as compared with only 17% growth in both years for midsize companies and 18% in large companies for 2009, 15% in 2010.

Many things drive storage growth, separately and in combination:

    continued digitization of business processes and documents.

    continually expanding amount of data associated with a given process.>/br>

    increasing size of many files, both because of document format changes and because so much data is now in the form of digital media (for example, medical imaging or document imaging).

    retention of more data and for longer period (“Much of what’s driving storage is e-mail archiving,” says a data center director at an insurance company).

    poor or nonexistent efforts to limit growth.

    server and desktop virtualization exploding system storage needs.

UC plays a role here. Once voice mail becomes MP3 (or WAV or whatever) files stored on data center SANs, UC contributes directly to storage consumption. Spreading UC deployments mean steady increases in that consumption. Adding technologies to the UC portfolio (adding video to voice, for example) just steepens the consumption curve.

Compliance- and discovery-driven retention of records multiplies the effect, as voice mails turned e-mails and meetings turned video streams become discoverable and retainable.

Industry plays a significant role in predicting storage needs too. Healthcare companies project mean growth rates of 68% this year and 48% in 2010, where education and manufacturing (the next highest projected rates) expect only 20% to 23% growth in 2009 and 2010. Healthcare is on the negative side of most of the driving factors for storage growth, especially a potent combination of digitization of both paper records and diagnostic imaging, as well as the general trend to UC.

Organizations pushing forward with UC need to take the storage implications into account as they plan the pace and scope of deployment. If UC’s operational and retention-driven storage needs will kill your current data center and force you to outsource, collocate, or build new space, you need to take that into account in the long range planning for both UC and DC.