Challenge
Business storage costs are soaring. The insatiable appetite of business applications for raw disk space is forcing storage to lay claim to a larger and larger percentage of the IT budget each year. And the trend shows no signs of slowing. The need to store, retrieve, share and archive greater volumes of information is growing at a remarkable pace.
Overview
Storage consolidation is driven by the cost and complexity of managing growing amounts of critical storage, and the recognition of data as a corporate asset that must be available and accessible.
There is an important, often overlooked distinction between consolidating storage and consolidating the data itself. Storage consolidation addresses some of the problems facing organizations today in terms of data management costs. But actual data consolidation is essential to meet service level requirements in increasingly data-dependent organizations without creating debilitating administrative overhead. Continued Further Down
Technical Features and Advantages
Flavor Technology can consolidate your storage (also known as storage convergence) by centralizing your data storage. The objective is to facilitate data backup and archiving for all users, while minimizing the time required to access and store data. Other desirable features include simplification of the storage infrastructure, centralized and efficient management, optimized resource utilization, and low operating cost. Read More...
Business Benefits
The benefits of data consolidation are many:
- Improved Security of Data: As data is consolidated
and becomes easier to secure and manage.
- Improved High Availability: Reducing the
numbers of servers and associated storage allows data to be
simply replicated, in real-time, to a remote location ensuring
immediate system availability in the event of a major failure
disaster. If one server is unavailable, its data remains available
to other servers. Read More...
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Overview
Storage consolidation is driven by the cost and complexity of managing growing amounts of critical storage, and the recognition of data as a corporate asset that must be available and accessible.
There is an important, often overlooked distinction between consolidating storage and consolidating the data itself. Storage consolidation addresses some of the problems facing organizations today in terms of data management costs. But actual data consolidation is essential to meet service level requirements in increasingly data-dependent organizations without creating debilitating administrative overhead.
Reducing the cost of storage administration is the big payoff for consolidating storage. According to IDC, storage administrators can manage up to nine times more data in a consolidated SAN environment than in a direct-attached model. Even accounting for the potentially higher costs of network administrators for this environment, management costs are reduced by 33%. [Source: IDC: Leveraging Networks for Storage Consolidation, October 2001.] The cost of storage itself is a secondary, but still significant factor.
The cost of storage falls into two broad categories:
- Capital costs
- Management costs.
Although the dollar-per-megabyte cost of disk space is falling, storage resource management costs are rising dramatically. IT managers spend seven times as much managing storage resources as they do acquiring them. Finding a means of maximizing the utility of existing resources, while allowing for the flexible and cost-effective deployment of new storage, is of paramount importance to IT managers.
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