The realisation that user demand has created an unholy mixture of different technologies is forcing companies to rethink how they should manage the whole of their storage options to achieve optimum performance and guarantee security.

Too many companies have bought disparate systems with different kinds of storage inside them. These are now scattered all over the enterprise. These devices manage important customer data, yet they are not themselves being managed and backed up as thoroughly as they would have been in the days when everything was held on the mainframe.

In most instances, shared storage can reduce operating costs and simplify backup requirements. 'But data security implications must be considered,' says Digital's StorageWorks marketing manager for the UK and Ireland, John Lockwood. He explains: 'For example, a business might well have one system running sensitive data and one running applications such as mail and messaging which is less sensitive.'

It is important to focus on how storage can be kept separate. 'Once you've bought all that storage and you realise you've got a lot of important data on it, there are lots of other issues you've got to look at,' says Mike Casey, Gartner's chief storage analyst. These choices are usually application-dependent. What kind of application are you running? Do you need high bandwidth and high transaction rates? Do you really need fault tolerance or do you just need to be able to recover your data if you lose it? Indeed, it's the creation and management of a storage architecture that becomes important: 'We've been telling our clients to take a considered, architectural approach to storage, and to think about where it should be located and managed,' adds Casey.

Michael Peterson, director of Stra-tegic Research Corporation, a US market research company specialising in the storage management field, agrees: 'We've got to stop talking PC Lan, Unix and mid-range and start talking about how the network is organised around the needs of a mission critical environment.'

'It's a different storage world than it was four years ago,' says Richard John, principal consultant at consultancy CITL. 'Then, the key issue facing IT management was cost of ownership. Now, it's all about managing storage across the enterprise.'

According to a recent survey carried out among IT directors by Find/SVP for storage supplier EMC, storage demand is continuing to grow rapidly: 'Data warehousing and new enterprise-wide applications, such as SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft and Oracle Financials are the major factors driving the rapid growth of storage,' says Mike Maunder, EMC's UK and Ireland marketing director. 'Electronic commerce will also drive storage demand. Half of the UK respondents to the survey said that they were planning to replicate their corporate databases for Internet use, in order to heighten data security.'

Such applications are providing more power to end users, and the data they consume is growing faster than IT managers can store and manage it.

And storage technology itself is in a state of flux as new technologies take hold in the market where there are now many suppliers and products. 'It's very easy for a vendor to piece together and sell a server storage solution,' says Tom Lahive, IDC's senior storage analyst.

Raid is now becoming a commodity product - plug and play out of the box. Many high-end servers from PC manufacturers now have Raid built in. 'The move to CD (jukeboxes) is mainly for archiving and the advent of DVD is going to drive this forward now that you can get 17.5Gb on a digital video disk,' says GigaStorage's operations manager, Paul Sleep, who claims that DVD will be mainstream by the second quarter of 1998. 'I reckon it may have taken over from CD by the year 2000 but we will start to see a definite shift next year, with a further push on DVD when Ram drives become available.'

Ultra-wide SCSI (which increases the number of disks you can connect to a single controller, as well as boost performance) is starting to appear. 'People want the higher speeds to match their Pentium chip sets and application needs,' says Xyratex' channel and business development manager Ursula Connolly.

However, suppliers are connecting ultra-wide drives and adapters via traditional SCSI cabling. 'This will typically reduce ultra-wide SCSI's performance by about 35%, although it won't affect customers needing high bandwidth as much because they don't continuously use the bus cable,' adds Connolly.

The role of storage on the network, rather than built into a server, is becoming more important and is thus growing in popularity. It's being seen as a system inextricably tied to delivering services, supporting users, protecting valuable data (often referred to as 'assets'), and providing network availability and crucial functionality in the race to close the information gap - the facility to provide corporate information to those who need it. These days most sites own a mixture of mid-range boxes. But, rather than just plugging in, say, 10Gb of storage from the vendor who supplied the hardware, customers are now starting to think twice about who should provide their storage and where it ought to be situated.

They may not be using the same platform in a year or two's time, so they are turning away from the hardware vendors toward third-party solution providers. Customers have had their fingers burned by internal Raid solutions sold by PC manufacturers, well known for chopping and changing their platforms.

Everyone is talking about Network Attached Storage (NAS), which allows the user to access the subsystem without going through the server. If the server fails you can still access your data. 'Every vendor has developed a plan on how it's going to provide a NAS product,' says IDC's Lahive.

The next generation of storage products, now well into production, conforms to the SCSI-3 standard, a more flexible solution to implement than today's SCSI-2 because it allows you to mix and match devices from different vendors on the same network. The backbone system also works four times as fast. 'SSA and F-CAL increase the distance between the server and the storage, so you can attach more devices, whether they be servers or storage subsystems, in one continuous loop,' says IDC's Lahive.

Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) - sold by Xyratex and IBM - and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL or Fibre Channel) - originally sold by Hewlett-Packard and Digital - are currently stimulating considerable interest. Says Lahive: 'These approaches boost performance, ca-pacity and improve scalability.'

Running SSA and Fibre Channel, it is possible to patch network storage devices all over the place without associating them with a single host.

There are moves afoot to converge SSA and FC-CAL into one standard, despite the fact that they are currently sold by two very separate camps of vendors. Customers have been better educated about the pros and cons of SSA in continental Europe, but now that Sun, Unisys and other server vendors have raised the flag on the Fibre Channel mast, we can expect a wave of publicity to hit our shores very soon.

And as Jay Kramer, director of business development and marketing for the Unisys storage systems programme points out: 'With Microsoft's commitment to support Fibre Channel in NT 5.0, this will be the building block for increased functionality in future releases of NT, such as the support of Microsoft's Wolfpack cluster software solution.'

BFPS Radio Storage for the multimedia age

Now part of the Armed Forces' broadcasting service, BFPS Radio is one of the first radio services in Europe to use new digital audio technologies in a #1 million 'audio-on-demand' network centre, at Chalfont Grove in Buckinghamshire. Recordings used to sit on conventional vinyl and tape. Now, the new network centre - with six studios and 25 workstations - uses SSA technology on a PC-based network to access 5,000 records and 8,000 audio tracks, as well as the usual stings and fillers. These are stored digitally and served up as presenters choose by manipulating images on computer screen. 'The ability to flick pieces of music and sound around and edit them during the programme, is going to give the presenters very much greater flexibility,' says Peter McDonagh, BFPS director. Programmes are stored in the equivalent of a library, - virtual shelves inside the computer - and then played out automatically at the appropriate time. 'In this way, you tailor a programme to suit each overseas location and target audience,' says McDonagh. 'This couldn't have been done before,' adds McDonagh. 'Listeners used to get a more generic programme. It was difficult to cater for each time zone and include local colour. Now you can produce something much more cosy.' The Dalet play-out technology that forms part of BFPS' broadcast systems plays out programmes to 20 destinations worldwide, across eight time zones. The BFPS station is the first to use Dalet for all its entire operations. BFPS aims to reach every member of the armed forces over the next five years, wherever they are in the world.