With information taking center stage as a competitive differentiator, storage has moved from supporting player to a leading role in a company's IT strategy and budget. The immediate tactical issue is how to accommodate the sheer volumes of data produced by new core business applications, new data-intensive technologies such as data warehousing and multimedia, and the commercialization of the Internet. Steadily increasing disc capacity and declining prices are fueling further growth by enabling projects that require even more vast volumes of data. The money that bought 40 megabytes of storage in 1989 can buy 10 gigabytes today. At these prices, it begins to look reasonable for a broadcast company, for example, to begin digitizing 500,000 hours of video archives.
Storage management challenges Capacity alone is only part of the total storage equation.
More critical are the storage management requirements to protect business-critical data and make it available to a wider range of users and applications, all while delivering minimum downtime and maximum performance. Yet, managing these vast volumes of data across networks and disparate systems is increasingly difficult and costly. In today's distributed IT environment, each hardware storage system and storage management software product is tied to an individual server, creating islands of data that are hard to bridge. Data is frequently duplicated from one isolated storage system to another so it can be accessed from different applications. Managing these disparate systems is a labor-intensive process, often requiring more staff.