Choose wisely
By Rhonda Gass (February 2003)
As your organization deals with the pressures of today's economic realities, the demand for a reliable, agile technology infrastructure has not diminished. Information continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, and you continue to experience significant challenges in preserving the integrity of your data, including the demands of employees, customers, and partners to have "always-on" access from any location.
Networked storage has become the widely accepted means to help your organization protect vital information. As you choose which storage solutions best meet your needs, simplicity, value, and power are key concepts to help guide you through the decision-making process.
Simplify your life
Storage systems that leverage standards-based platforms have become a cost-effective, flexible way to meet the performance and availability needs of today while accommodating growth in the future. Managing and servicing these systems must also be easy, intuitive tasks. Dell offers storage management tools that automate the installation and configuration of systems, as well as provide troubleshooting assistance. These tools allow you to take a real-time "picture" of your storage area network (SAN) and e-mail it directly to a DellTM support member to determine what issues you need to resolve.
Inject value into your decisions
As your business purchases storage systems, value is of paramount importance. Storage solutions must offer the best price/performance ratio for your current needs, as well as a low-cost and easy way to add capacity as your storage needs grow. For example, Dell's network attached storage (NAS) systems offer a migration path to a SAN if you need the business continuance and disaster recovery capabilities offered by a SAN. Dell can work with your company to integrate the SAN and NAS platforms so that you can leverage your existing storage investments to drive down costs and extend the life of your systems.
Empower your infrastructure
Storage systems must have the power to provide consistent data availability—whether for e-mail, database, file archiving, backup of clients and servers, or temporary spill-over storage. As new technology innovations come to market, Dell can offer your business the advice and support to determine how these architectures can increase the power of your investments.
While you strive to protect information from loss or disaster, always choose the right storage systems that optimise the availability of vital information. At Dell, we strive to create storage systems that allow companies to manage network resources with greater efficiency—and, most important, help lower the overall cost of owning one of the most mission-critical systems in your enterprise.
Rhonda Gass is vice president of storage systems development in the Dell Product Group.
