Business is fueled by information. The success of a business is determined by the architecture, speed and reliability of access to enterprise information. Logically, enterprises place themselves in a more strategic and competitive position with well-defined information architectures, highly available network technology, and the capacity to access information quickly. Nevertheless, because the amount of information an enterprise must retain is growing at an astounding rate, it is becoming increasingly difficult for enterprises to effectively manage critical information and quickly locate needed data,
What this all means is that information does not stop once its base starts growing -- information continues to build on information. The challenges resulting from exponential information growth that enterprises must overcome, and the importance of selecting and managing a storage solution that works to this end-to-end, are critical issues that must be successfully navigated by a company in order for it to maintain its competitive edge. Several factors contribute significantly to the explosion of information that challenges an enterprise's success.
The occurrence of mergers and acquisitions is the first of these factors. As companies come together, the quantity of data multiplies and becomes distributed across the enterprise. This distribution not only makes information management increasingly complex; it also makes locating information increasingly difficult.
Second, the expanding use of the Internet and e-commerce applications only serves to perpetuate the information management problem. The majority of an enterprise's storage resources can be consumed by the large amount of data and cumbersome text, audio, image, and video files used in Internet and e-commerce applications.
Third, as the number of users and the quantity of data increases, so does the demand to share resources across the enterprise. Existing information management challenges are intensified by the existence of proprietary technology and the inability to share information.
Finally, additional stress is placed on computing resources as enterprises continue to broaden their customer bases. The delivery of fast, reliable access to enterprise resources is made difficult by this stress.
The culmination of these factors leaves enterprises with a plethora of unorganized information and strained technology resources. Inevitably, user productivity slows and computing systems go down. Also, as enterprises attempt to make sense out of chaotic information architectures, they scramble for a solution that offers past and future technology investment protection, lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), and enables quick, reliable information access across the enterprise. Nevertheless, more and more enterprises realize that the storage capacity and performance necessary to meet these needs by general-purpose servers is lacking.
Page 2: Storage Solution Selection
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