Difficulty managing growing capacity requirements
Many organizations tell us their storage capacity is growing at a pace faster than they can manage. The requirement to ensure that capacity is available when and where needed has driven the demand for storage networking and storage consolidation, as well as the development of management software that provide administrators with powerful visualization tools for storage resource management. For simple server disk storage expansion, an external disk storage enclosure is a straightforward approach to expand capacity on a single server or pair of clustered servers.
Unable to scale performance as application and capacity demands increase
As an organization scales its storage infrastructure to high levels of capacity, technologies must be present to prevent performance from being negatively impacted. Device management and infrastructure management software helps administrators identify performance bottlenecks and enable performance to be tuned to meet service level requirements.
Time-consuming management of user-level files on pub shares
With public user share directories often stored on multiple servers within an organization, managing and monitoring file storage can be costly and time-consuming. Storage resource management software can provide powerful capabilities to alleviate user-level file management challenges, enabling administrators to set user quotas and detect which users store the most files. Furthermore, automated actions can be established to manage files that are temporary, duplicate, or stored out of compliance with IT policy.
Trouble achieving optimal capacity utilization
Sometimes it seems capacity is rarely in the right place when it is needed most. Disks that are captive to some servers may go under-utilized, while other servers can frequently run out of space. In environments with so much inefficiency, IT staffs may have difficulty forecasting and planning for storage growth. Problems can be further exacerbated because adding or redeploying disk drives can often be accompanied by downtime. Storage consolidation and data archiving can help organizations get more out of disk storage investments.
Struggling to meet operational service level agreements
To service internal customers, IT organizations establish service level agreements to define a set of services vital to keep operations running smoothly, such as the availability of important applications or guaranteed e-mail delivery times. Business continuity is an approach in which high availability and disaster recovery strategies are employed to help IT organizations meet their service level agreements with internal customers. This often consists of a comprehensive approach to provide system, data, application, and site redundancy.
