In these cash-strapped times spending you way out of a data boom isn't as easy as it was so last week we packed our studio with 3 storage experts to talk through the alternatives.

Jon Collins from Inter Orbis hosted the gig and he was joined by Tony Lock from Freeform Dynamics and Ian Shave from IBM. They look at the challenge from top to bottom starting with asking themselves - how do you find out the scope of the storage challenge, the utilisation, the performance, the bottlenecks and the real needs of users. From there there, with quite a lot of help from the audience, they dive down into this bunch:

How fast is data growing and is it really a problem? What are the consequences of data growth? What new solutions are available? - Dedupe, compression, data virtualisation, cloud, image based backups etc. Are new storage management solutions only suitable for use in big companies? Have storage management and administration tools still the preserve of the storage guru? Why change anything now? Is anything changing in the real world? What steps can be taken now?

If you're ready to start thinking about storage management we're hoping this will be just the fillip. You can watch it and download the accompanying slides right here.