Storage Management

Overview

Benefits

Solutions

Resources

		Disk error or failure
		Data corruption due to application failure
		Human error like accidental file deletion
		Natural or infrastructure disasters that cause outages

These threats are not addressed by simply allocating more disk storage and IT staff time. According to International Technology Group, server-based disk storage in Fortune 500 companies has been growing exponentially-from an average of seven terabytes at the end of 1996 to 48 terabytes at the end of 2002-and is projected to be more than 230 terabytes by the end of 2007. But most of these organizations have underutilized storage resources that sit idle in one part of the enterprise, while the rest of the storage infrastructure is overloaded-often with large amounts of inactive data.

Additionally, storage management expenses are occupying larger percentages of IT budgets-from 11 percent in 1996 to 17 percent in 2003-and are projected by International Technology Group to be more than 22 percent in 2007. As IT budgets remain flat overall, that means less and less IT staff time is available for initiatives with higher business values.

		Business critical continuity
		Information life cycle management
		Information life cycle management

Business critical continuity
Because an on demand business relies on its IT systems to conduct business, everything must be working all the time. Nothing less is acceptable. A sound and comprehensive business continuity strategy encompasses high availability, near continuous operations and disaster recovery.

Maximizing application availability and business continuity depends on facilitating reliable access to enterprise data. Storage management solutions need to be able to support your business-critical data in a number of ways:

		Efficiently back up critical data
		Recover enterprise data quickly
		Proactively avoid potential outages
		Align storage resources with your business priorities

Information life cycle management
Optimizing the storage and management of information based on its value to your business is the primary goal of information life-cycle management (ILM). Your storage management solutions should help you take into account your corporate governance policies, business processes and compliance guidelines as you establish your ILM policies. You should be able to use ILM processes to help maximize the business value of information from the moment of its creation to the moment of its disposal. Other potential benefits include optimized risk management, storage utilization, handling of compliance issues and costs.

Simplify your infrastructure
Infrastructure simplification means considering the entire IT operation to find opportunities that minimize the complexity accompanying business growth that can still raise costs, reduce reliability and create dependencies on specialized skills. Simplify your infrastructure to help minimize fixed costs and become highly flexible when responding to business needs. Simplification includes consolidation, virtualization and automated storage management.

The right storage management solutions will help you deliver information dynamically and thereby take an important step toward becoming an On Demand Business: an enterprise whose business processes-integrated end to end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers-can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.