Data continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Traditional transaction-processing applications continue to capture more data. Recent regulatory requirements and newer storage-intensive applications, such as e-mail, multi-media, life sciences research, and biometrics, are driving growth rates even higher. For many companies, this means adding more capacity to disparate storage systems spread throughout the enterprise. This approach is costly to manage, wasteful, and unable to deliver the quality of service—availability and performance—application users require.

Are you still running your business-critical applications on server-internal or direct attached storage? Are some of your storage systems maxed out while others are barely used? Are your storage management costs growing faster than your budget? How about your environmental costs—electricity, cooling, even floor space? Are your backup windows exceeding the time allotted? Are you able to meet the availability and performance levels demanded by your users and applications? Consolidated, networked storage reduces management complexity and cuts operational cost.

The formation of centralized storage pools that can be managed as a whole and shared across applications and servers improves storage utilization. Consolidating storage reduces the number of footprints, delivering savings in environmental costs while improving availability and performance. Coupling consolidated networked storage with robust Storage Management software yields the highest total cost of ownership (TCO) and fastest return on investment (ROI) by greatly improving the amount of storage that administrators can manage.