We have had an interesting internal discussion at CMS Watch the past few days, surrounding the cost of storage for content technology systems. It is a discussion that too few buyers have before embarking on costlyECM orDAM projects. Enterprises often assume that storage, just like networking, is simply a corporate IT overhead — and maybe in your organization it is — but that doesn’t mean it’s free.

So how much does storage cost? Well, it’s like the answer to the question, how long is a piece of string…..”it depends.” But a better answer may be “more than you might think.” In many cases much more, and quite often more than the cost of the application software and associated services will cost you.

The variables here revolve around the type of content you manage. If it’s mostly html files, then the volume will not likely be too high. If on the other hand, it is typically Office files, or worse still Rich Media (such as video files) then your storage needs will shoot up. These days Terabytes of data are the norm; typical ECM installations have 25-50TB of content, and some run into the multiple Petabytes. And these numbers are only likely to grow as rich media and ever richer documents become the norm.

Continues @ http://www.cmswatch.com