Better management of storage, rather than just the addition of extra capacity, is key to solving many of today's biggest enterprise IT headaches, according to HP.

Steve Watson, product marketing manager for HP's StorageWorks division, told vnunet.com at the Storage Expo show in London today that the plummeting cost of storage over the past few years has led many organisations to throw more capacity at the problem of exploding data requirements.

However, Watson believes that, rather than solving the problem, this has simply led to an even greater mess for businesses to deal with.

While storage needs will continue to grow for every business, better management of the content can help in a variety of ways, including improved security, better compliance, lower energy costs and increased productivity.

Watson pointed out that, although the initial cost of storage is relatively cheap, the cost of each megabyte of data stored is seven to 10 times that of the physical medium itself.

This means that companies need to consider the cost of the entire data lifecycle rather than just the cost of the physical storage itself.

Proper implementation of storage virtualisation, data classification, de-duplication and data management can reduce this factor to four or five times, bringing tremendous cost savings and helping solve a number of other issues at the same time, according to HP.

Watson added that, with properly classified and managed data, companies will be able to reduce the storage capacity they require, which in turn reduces energy costs and overheads.

This approach can also help reduce the possibility of accidental data leaks, improve employee productivity as they no longer need to spend time hunting for the content they require, and meet compliance and regulatory checks.

Watson concluded that storage virtualisation is a key enabler of this, allow ing businesses to centrally manage all their data, make better use of existing and legacy resources and scale their capacity in parallel with requirements.

His comments are backed up by the findings of recent research from HP, which found that, although virtualisation adoption rates are high, the full benefits are not being realised as many still see it as a technology rather than a business tool.