Question of the Month: What do you see as your biggest storage challenge in 2009?

"It will be backups. 10TB of storage is fine, but having to have three or four copies of it is not (in mirrors and backups)."
--Chris Marble, Unix systems manager, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA

"The biggest storage challenge we're going to face is the new demand for virtual machines and ESX."
--Steve Boddy, senior network engineer, CCH Small Firm Services, Caribou, ME

"Meeting the ever-increasing demand for additional storage, while also dealing with an ever-shrinking budget."
--Jim Doyle, IT consultant, Office Depot, Delray Beach, FL

"End users afraid of purging data or pushing aggregate data to data marts or warehouses or offline to tape in an archive/storage environment. Disk may be cheap, but in the NAS array world of today, reliable and effective storage solutions are anything but."
--August A. Costanza, lead DBA, Newsday LLC, Melville, NY

For more on storage planning, see "2009: Do more with less"