By John W. Thompson
Aligning Storage with the Business
As businesses rely more and more on information technology to drive collaboration, innovation, and growth, the challenges of dealing with data center complexity only increase. There are literally hundreds of hardware and software combinations in the data center-all with their own set of management tools. This results in dozens of disconnected silos, creating a management nightmare.
To add to the predicament, storage requirements are growing at more than 60 percent a year. The list of "musts" is long: storage must meet compliance requirements; it must be recoverable-quickly-in the event of a disaster; it must make the most efficient use of power, space, and cooling, all of which are becoming alarmingly scarce in today's data center environment.
The key to solving these challenges is a standardized yet flexible software infrastructure. The ideal environment will support all of the platforms you have deployed, from operating systems to hardware alternatives and applications. And the choices you make today should establish the foundation for a more modular approach to storage management that maximizes your flexibility and control as you grow.
Simply put, the key is using software that allows you to unite the platforms and the administration with the overall business plan. This alignment allows IT to embark on the path toward delivering storage as a service and driving confidence in your ability to manage the overall risk to the IT environment.
In this edition of CIO Digest, we offer several articles to help you with storage issues. "Snip! 8 Tips to Cutting Storage Costs" and "The Doctor Is In" reveal how organizations around the world handle storage growth while keeping costs down. In "Advanced Medicine," Baptist Health South Florida outlines its storage and disaster recovery strategies. And don't miss "Letter Perfect," in which Mark Kolodzej, VP of IT for ING Investment Management Group, LLC, shares how he orchestrated a major IT infrastructure consolidation project while managing the complexity of compliance regulations.
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