Storage and Availability Management

Look back over the past 20 years and think about the size of drives you’ve purchased.  The first PC I owned ran Windows 95 and had a gigantic 512 MB hard-drive.  This machine was used primarily for writing papers, emacs based email, and ‘surfing the net’.  There was no way I could ever conceive of filling up my drive and thought I’d have the machine for years.  Then the default format for music and photos was digitized, and it quickly ran out of space.  When I bought my next PC, it had 8 times the storage, but came at a similar price.

That’s in the consumer space – where it gets interesting from the Enterprise Storage perspective.  When SANs were gaining popularity for their speed and capacities back in the early 2000’s, 10 TB SANs were enormous and only reserved for the largest and most IT aggressive customers.  In 2001, EMC Symmetrix 8000’s could be configured from 72 GB to...

Server virtualization and storage virtualization is a vehicle that many companies have adopted as the leading strategy to help them accomplish more with less resources. At the endpoints, desktop virtualization is also turning corners now and CIOs are building strategies around centralizing data, applications and desktop operating systems, while realizing that the savings span across multiple lines of business. However, there are many challenges associated with virtual desktop environments, which is why today we are announcing Symantec VirtualStore.

No one will argue that desktop virtualization comes with a significant upfront investment, but the clear goal is to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) per employee.
With a centrally hosted desktop solution, IT administrators can:

• Reduce data loss due to downtime or lost disks.
• Reduce administrative overhead of maintaining 1000s of desktops.
• Reduce OPEX helpdesk costs
• Increase...