Symantec boss tells industry to stop buying storage

Enrique Salem believes that storage should be more flexible and efficient

The new head of Symantec has told delegates at Storage Networking World in Orlando that they should stop buying more storage and focus on what they have.

In his first major address (PDF) since taking over as head of Symantec, Enrique Salem told delegates that they were missing a trick by focusing on return on investment (ROI) when they should be focusing on ROY, or "return on yesterday".

"My key message for you today: Stop buying storage. You heard me right. Stop buying storage," he said. "How? Reduce the amount of information that you store in the first place, and make the storage you do have more flexible and efficient."

Salem outlined four strategies to achieve this: storage resource management; thin provisioning; data deduplication; and intelligent archiving.

Salem criticised hardware companies that sell storage management tools which detect only their own hardware. Most datacentres use multiple hardware manufacturers, and storage managers need to be aware of this.

Secondly, storage needs to be allocated on demand rather than building large storage arrays that sit idle until they fill up. Similarly, when data is deleted servers need to be aware of this and allocate it back to a common pool.

Salem also warned about data duplication, pointing out that a 5MB presentation in three employees' inboxes, if backed up once a week, would lead to 15,600 copies in storage by the year's end.

Finally, he said that archiving needs to be more intelligent by embracing tiered storage and smarter archiving.

Salem made his speech the day after IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker found that Symantec is maintaining its position as the number two in the storage software market with 18.3 per cent of revenues compared to EMC's 26 per cent.