Almost every vendor briefing I've had lately seems to start with some variation of this statement: "Worldwide data growth is unprecedented, and it's not stopping anytime soon."

So I'm proposing a shift: Vendors, cut down on the time spent telling us about the data growth explosion. It's obvious to everyone that data is exploding, especially to the storage managers and admins who are watching it fill up disks and slow down backups. Instead, let's get down to the business of storing it intelligently. It's not enough ...

The time we'll save is better spent deleting, deduplicating, compressing, virtualizing and otherwise getting this pile of information down to a manageable size. It's certainly not getting any smaller, and vendors are the ones with the resources to develop the technology that's needed.

--Christine Cignoli