No longer dismissed by business managers as a mere operations component, IT is now an essential element of corporate plans to drive up profit. This elevates IT professionals to a new prominence within organizations - but with this prominence comes a higher expectation to deliver a smoothly running, reliable application infrastructure in the face of some difficult challenges. Studies show hard disk capacity requirements are doubling every 12 months.
SANs promise a scaleable mechanism for recentralizing enterprise data storage.
Driving the need for greater storage capacity is an interesting mix of business applications. Though most of the software types mentioned by the SAN study participants are not mission critical, these applications are certainly essential elements of business communications. Data warehouse applications that companies use to store and correlate a vast amount of competitive data are notoriously capacity hungry. Though most companies wouldn't describe their e-mail as mission critical, messaging is one of the more effective and efficient communication mechanisms used by businesses today. Other Internet-related activities are having a direct impact on corporate storage needs.