Ironically, most organizations still lack a long-term strategy for managing their information assets. Scarcity of skilled resources, lack of knowledge, cost and time pressures, and other urgent priorities prevent them from successfully transitioning to the next-generation of storage-centric, information-rich enterprise computing environments.

Furthermore, most IT organizations have their hands full just managing the infrastructure in place today.  It is not uncommon for companies to have 10s or 100s of under-utilized servers and storage devices scattered across their operations, each with different combinations of storage devices, applications, operating systems, management platforms, etc.  Issues of data sharing, protection, and management, information security, service levels, and integration consume all available IT resources.

STORAGE-CENTRIC INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Storage is moving out of the back room and to the forefront. Forward- looking organizations have begun to organize their enterprise information architecture around their storage infrastructure.  As the keeper of enterprise information assets, the storage infrastructure is the information infrastructure - the central point around which the remainder of the computing environment - servers, networks, PCs and access devices - is organized.

In recent years, storage technology developments have responded to user requirements for improved sharing, management, and protection of enterprise data assets, through the introduction of innovations including:

• Storage-Area Networks (SANs): Storage has evolved from separate "islands" directly attached to a dedicated server (DAS), to a shared resource accessible from a dedicated, high-speed network, making data available to a variety of heterogeneous servers, operating platforms, and enterprise applications.
  
• Network-attached Storage (NAS): Specialized storage protocols have made remote storage available to servers over industry-standard IP networks, enabling flexible, shared access to information wherever the network extends.
  
• Policy-based Storage Management: An innovation in storage management platforms that abstracts storage management tasks from the underlying platforms, and automates the execution of tasks based upon higher-level policies and thresholds.
  
• Storage Virtualization: A more recent introduction which makes network-connected storage subsystems easier to optimize and manage by "pooling" storage assets and presenting them as a common resource to the administrator.

OVERCOMING STORAGE MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES

As they look to standardize their operations and cut costs, organizations are increasingly challenged by their storage resource and management requirements.  Demand for capacity is exploding, end-user service level expectations are rising, budgets are frozen or falling, and IT managers are under pressure to respond to business changes.  The scope and growing complexity of storage is outpacing organization's ability to manage it cost-effectively. 

Facing up to these challenges, organizations are aggressively looking at upgrading their server and storage infrastructure via:

• Server Consolidation: Reducing the number and variety of server and operating platforms in place, centralizing server resources to facilitate improved security and management, and standardizing management platforms and tools.
  

• Storage Consolidation: Shifting from Direct-Attached (DAS) to networked storage (SAN, NAS) architectures, improving information access, storage performance and availability, and facilitating centralized storage management policies and frameworks.
  

• Backup Consolidation: In line with server and storage consolidation, reducing the # of backup platforms in place, and standardizing on media and management platforms, in order to improve reliability, and cut costs.

More recently, organizations were reminded of the need to implement more robust Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) strategies.  Consolidating and standardizing server and storage platforms dramatically improves DR/BC planning at the information layer, because common procedures can be applied to ensure that all critical enterprise data are protected, whether by backup, mirroring, replication, or other techniques.