Reducing Storage Complexity

IT organizations of all sizes are struggling to deal with the tremendous growth in data and the complexity of storage management. They are supporting a growing array of data intensive applications (e.g., business analytics) and content rich applications (e.g., digital images or video). They are also improving application availability and disaster recovery through increased use of disk-based data protection/replication. In this information intensive environment, IT managers need to optimize the capacity and performance of storage systems while working to reduce complexity and lower costs. Today's challenging economic times only bring more focus on these requirements. IT organizations are also adapting to a major shift happening with the use of diskbased backup and recovery solutions, which provide improved data protection with greater availability and continuity than previous solutions (i.e. tape). While they speed up and simplify some operations, they are not without their own management and operational challenges. These solutions improve application and data availability by enhancing system backup performance and reliability, shorten file restore times and are supported by major backup vendors. However, they add to the amount of data being stored on a daily basis and represent another element to manage. D a t a G r o w t h The march of digital data continues at a rapid pace. Even in difficult economic times, applications are generating tremendous amounts of data. Corporate reorganizations and mergers along with increased governmental regulations all contribute. Through the rest of this decade, IDC forecasts that the amount of external disk storage capacity shipped is still growing around 50% a year. A variety of applications across a broad set of industries is driving this data growth. The use of high performance computing is expanding in a wide range of industries (e.g., financial services, life sciences, energy, media/entertainment). At the same time, companies are leveraging more collaboration and web 2.0 applications to boost productivity and improve customer support. Databases are at the heart of these applications, and the analysis of these databases is spurring greater use of data warehousing and business intelligence to improve efficiencies and market opportunities for organizations. In many industries ranging from health care to media/entertainment and in specialized markets such as video surveillance and product life cycle management, a shift to digital content is now beyond the point of no return. These digital transformations are already spurring exponential increases in image data and associated content. The traditional method for dealing with these data increases has been to move to larger disk drives, larger disk systems, and multiple tiers of storage. Many of these technologies and techniques have been effective (up until now) at storing large amounts of data, but they have not necessarily simplified management of the data or the systems that store it.