"[Storage strategy] is just starting to hit CIOs' radar screens," says Mark Shirman, CEO and president of Glasshouse Technologies, a storage consultancy in Framingham, Mass. "We've probably talked to 50 or so CIOs in the past six months, and we get one of two reactions. One is, 'Yes, storage is a huge cost, and we're just starting to take a look at how to better manage it.' The other one is, 'Huh?"

Harry Roberts falls into the first camp. "We're taking the first steps in managing storage as an entity--we're just putting together a five-year plan for storage, for example," say Roberts, vice president and CIO of Boscov's Department Stores, a $1 billion retailer based in Reading, Pa. Roberts, who predicts that his storage needs will grow by 50 percent every year, has reexamined his disaster recovery plan and is evaluating technologies that will help him manage storage growth without having to expand his staff. "We're talking terabytes of data, and that's a huge amount of stuff to take care of. So we really have to start thinking about it," he says.

Applications such as CRM and ERP create huge amounts of data. Moreover, the data generated by these enterprise applications is likely to be in demand all over the company so that marketing, sales and service reps can respond to customer buying habits and sales trends.

Trouble is, many data caches reside on direct attached storage (DAS), which can't share data--or capacity--between different servers, let alone across a company. Not only does DAS make it difficult to satisfy user demands, but IT executives are forced to buy more storage--and hire more people to administer the system--even though there is still unfilled capacity in their data center. "[That] costs a lot of money," says George Medairy, director of corporate IT at Sheetz, a $2 billion convenience store company based in Altoona, Pa. "We have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in various aspects of storage."

Enter the storage network, which evolved in answer to the DAS problem. By pulling storage devices onto a network, companies can theoretically get rid of the interconnectivity problem and manage capacity better. Jerry McElhatton, president of global technology and operations at MasterCard International in Purchase, N.Y., has put together a centralized storage center with several storage area networks that run 130 terabytes of storage. He says that even though the company's applications have grown hugely, "we're able to add more storage without adding more people to maintain it. The cost per byte of storage is actually less than before we put this in."