CIOs need truly unified storage

By StorageAsia Editors | Mar 4, 2011

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In the past, when an IT solution was required to address a business challenge, businesses would typically purchase a new application running on a compatible operating system before looking into the hardware - including storage systems - that they needed.

This process is clearly outdated today. In a white paper focused on storage efficiency, IDC revealed that business attitudes to storage have changed dramatically in the past year. According to IDC, while storage has been considered as add-on options in the past, there is now much greater demand for technology efficiencies within storage systems.

In an environment driven by virtualization and shared infrastructure, your storage solution plays an important part in determining the performance of your data center. Maximizing the benefits from a virtualized shared infrastructure really rests on achieving a truly unified storage architecture, according to NetApp.

Here are three reasons why:

1. Reducing complexity: To unlock the benefits of a shared infrastructure, businesses need a storage system that can support any virtual client. To do this, your unified storage platform must perform at every level – consolidating heterogeneous systems, protocols, drive, connectivity and even management. Only then will you be able to truly treat your storage assets as a single pool and manage data seamlessly across all your storage assets.
2. Increasing productivity: A unified set of tools and processes will significantly reduce storage and data management cost and free up your staff for more strategic IT work. For example, NetApp offers features and functionality to allow multiple storage functions to be consolidated on a single system. You no longer need to differentiate storage needed for primary, secondary, backup, disaster recovery or archive. IT administrators can easily setup and manage these requirements using a single platform, thus increasing productivity and operational efficiency.
3. Supporting current and future needs: Being flexible is a business imperative. Today, CIOs have a responsibility to ensure that IT can respond quickly to changing business demands. The resources that you choose today must be able to scale up and scale out to meet current and future business demands. A unified architecture with intelligent caching and core storage efficiency solutions will help IT to scale for future growth, without buying more storage.

The dawn of a shared IT infrastructure provides many compelling reasons to move away from legacy infrastructure and application-specific architectures. A shared IT infrastructure provides the chance to future proof the set of decisions that people are making today to ensure that these decisions stay flexible and future-ready. A shared IT infrastructure is at the foundation of IT as a service and the answer to revamping IT to be the business enabler it is meant to be.

Unified storage multiplies the performance of a shared infrastructure. A truly unified storage architecture is capable of meeting all storage needs from a single platform with a single architecture, without adding complex layers.

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