Creating tiers of storage solutions has quickly become the industry's answer to ever-increasing costs and data volume. The first step in what is touted as information lifecycle management, storage tiers are supposed to provide differing price/performance solutions. When information is of high value, the high cost of storage can be tolerated, but it must quickly be moved to a lower cost solution as its value to the business diminishes. So goes the theory. But where is the poster child?

The results vary somewhat. Organizations are ill-equipped to perform long-term information management. Budgets operate on 12-month cycles, equipment is leased or depreciates over 36 or 48 months while information may need to be managed for 20 years. Organizations are therefore forced to continue to think about the cost of another 100 terabytes (TB) of storage, rather than the cost of managing another 100 TB of information for 20 years. The economics of asset cost and lifecycle continues to dominate the conversation around storage tiers. So, the question becomes, how big an impact do tiers of storage create in the economics of information management and what parts of the puzzle remain unsolved?