The increasingly sophisticated world of IT has dramatically altered the demand for data storage and enhanced its value to the enterprise. Desktop, department, and enterprise environments have evolved to the point where data once viewed as a static resource is now viewed as mission-critical company assets.
In this highly competitive environment, the IT community has come to realize how the capabilities of online storage management and the presence of standard operating systems such as Windows NT can significantly enhance data storage systems.
At the desktop level, office applications such as spreadsheets, word processors, database programs, multimedia, and imaging software have driven the most recent generation of PCs to the point where they feature hard drives with multiple gigabytes of storage and random access memory (RAM) of up to 1 gigabyte. At department and workgroup levels, the demands on data storage have been more dramatic as users work collaboratively on projects that generate terabytes of data and span not only departments and workgroups, but nations and continents.
Storage Area Networks
Storage Area Network (or SAN) architecture allows a great deal of flexibility and scalability in comparison to traditional, direct-attached storage models. By carefully specifying SAN infrastructure, businesses can ensure their network is capable of expanding, easily and cost effectively, beyond its initial configuration and still support performance and data availability needs.
The operational benefits of a SAN, over traditional SCSI storage architectures, include improved manageability, scalability, distance, performance, hardware sharing and configuration flexibility. The financial benefits parallel the operational benefits in three primary areas of SAN ROI: capital, personnel and availability.
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