Becoming an on demand business is about finding new ways to grow, adapt and respond in a dynamic business environment while managing costs. Because data is a critical component of businesses today, efficiently handling the growing amounts of information is one of the keys to success for an on demand business. The storage environment is an important part of the IT infrastructure to help achieve the goal of operating as an on demand business.
Virtualization. Storage virtualization can help you to make complexity transparent and offer you a composite view of your storage assets to help you get the most out of your resources. This may help reduce capital and administrative costs, while giving users excellent service and availability. Virtualization is designed to help make your IT infrastructure more responsive, scalable and available.
Consolidation. Concentrating systems and resources into locations with fewer but more-powerful servers and storage pools can help increase IT efficiency. Data and application integration can help simplify systems management and improve security. And centralized management tools can help you achieve better scalability, higher availability, and improved disaster tolerance.
Automation. Choosing storage components with autonomic capabilities can help keep costs down while improving availability and responsiveness and help protect your data as your storage needs grow. As soon as day-to-day tasks are automated, storage administrators may be able to spend more time on critical, higher-level tasks unique to a company's business mission.
Integration. An effective on demand storage environment should facilitate data integration while freeing personnel resources to work on this integration. Enabling all servers to have secure access to all data can help your infrastructure respond better to your user's information needs.
