The focus on Enterprise Storage should not be on managing disks but as a strategic plan on managing data and address the needs for;

  • Efficiency – to reduce the cost of ownership by purchasing and using significantly less storage, simplified management, optimal utilization of disk storage.
  • Agility – an agile hardware platform to redefine efficiency, productivity and protection in a truly scalable enterprise storage solution.
  • Resiliency – to deliver full system and data protection.

Storage consolidation presents one physical, centrally managed storage system as multiple logical storage systems to multiple servers. Storage consolidation offers these benefits:

  • Storage consolidation reduces administration costs through centralization of storage systems – system administrators will have fewer storage systems to manage and maintain
  • Another cost savings is that you need fewer “types” of components and potentially fewer drives are needed as a result of consolidation, lowering initial and/or incremental hardware costs.
  • Flexible storage allocation – the ability to dynamically distribute and re-distribute storage as needed (O/S independent).
  • More efficient use of storage – host storage can be allocated closer to required capacity and available storage is usable by any host (no wasted space).
  • Storage consolidation provides the opportunity to amortize the cost of highly available, high performance storage over multiple servers or clusters.
  • Storage systems and servers can be purchased independently of each other giving the end user the ability to choose the best system for any application.
  • Free up administrators time to focus on other needs of the enterprise.

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http://www.tegile.com
http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/network-storage-products
http://www.drobo.com
http://storageflex.com/index.php/products.html