Today, IT organizations face the challenge of managing exploding data volumes, delivering high service levels, and mitigating business risks while at the same time keeping costs under control. And they must do all these things within a data center environment where complexity has grown out of control.
Over the past 10 years, organizations have gone from leveraging e-mail as an alternative communications vehicle to depending on it as their most mission-critical application. A research firm has estimated that the average corporate e-mail user sends and receives a total of 84 messages per day. The average message size of a message without an attachment is about 22 KB. By 2008, the firm estimates that an average corporate e-mail user will process up to 15.8 MB of data daily. For a company with 1,000 users, that’s 10 GB per day, or 200 GB per month.
Of course, the increase in the volume of e-mail coming into the corporate network introduces an exponential growth in associated hard costs by regularly exceeding the available capacity of traditional e-mail gateway systems, mail transfer agents, e-mail storage servers, groupware servers and network bandwidth.
This explosive growth in data volumes comes at a time when the average enterprise data center is becoming increasingly complex. That’s partly because organizations rarely buy all of their servers, routers, switches and other network hardware and software from a single vendor at one time. If that were the case, they would be able to implement a truly end-to-end, homogenous network that works together and provides some form of centralized console for management and administration.
But as IT departments know all too well, networks have a way of evolving on their own. Networks grow over time, picking up and adding whatever piece makes the most sense or provides the best value at the time. The more the network grows, the more cumbersome it can be to manage and secure. For companies that have three or four different hardware vendors and dozens of different application vendors, the list of infrastructure software they must support becomes unmanageable.
But what if organizations were able to gain more control over their data center storage environments? What if they were able to eliminate numerous point solutions and instead manage their infrastructure with one tool? Wouldn’t they be in a better position? A complete solution for heterogeneous storage management should therefore include:

Increased storage utilization: Storage utilization and capacity management are improved across heterogeneous operating systems and storage hardware. Storage volumes and file systems are grown and capacity is reclaimed, and storage is provisioned to new applications without any modifications required by the end-user.

Dynamic storage tiering: This allows unimportant or out-of-date files to be moved automatically to less expensive storage devices without changing the way users or applications access those files. Policies are created that will move files based on date created, last time accessed, owner, size or name.
Centralized storage management: This means that organizations centrally manage their application, server, and storage environments. It will lead to faster application deployment times, higher service levels, reduced risk of human error, and greater visibility throughout the environment.

Multi-vendor hardware infrastructure: This provides enterprises with the freedom to choose industry-leading functionality across platforms without getting locked into proprietary solutions.
Ultimately, centralized visibility and control across multi-platform server, storage and application environments should enable IT organizations to reduce operational costs and capital expenditure.