Enterprise Storage Management is more than just Backup and Recovery (page 2 of 2)

The automation of storage configuration, capacity planning, troubleshooting, event notification can provide significant savings in time and labour as well as warning organisations on a global basis where system errors have occurred.

Storage Area Networking - Storage Area Networks provide greater connectivity for block data storage. Products have been introduced to support, manage, and optimise storage performance, including SAN storage virtualisation appliances, backup systems, and management applications.

Storage Virtualisation - In a virtualised storage system, the storage resources accessed by a server's applications are indirectly related to physical storage. This provides an extra degree of freedom that can avoid the need to dedicate storage appliances, or to pre-allocate fixed amounts of storage capacity and can be simultaneously mirrored elsewhere for reliability.

The return on investment for organisations can be phenomenal. Where 10 administrators were once required to insert tapes, remove, catalogue, run backups, now one or two can manage the automated system adequately, leaving other resources to work on more important management functions.

Administrators can now manage storage, allocation, and configuration, with a simple click. The administrator now defines the policies for storage management and the storage management systems automatically implement those policies. When the situations defined arise, the system automatically initiates the appropriate response, while alerting the administrator and preventing data storage failure.

With the increase in the complexity of an organisation's systems there is now no time manually reroute communication links or reprogram applications. Now systems monitor processes, ensure the accurate replication, backup, or virtualisation of data, sense failures, and seamlessly failover to mirrored sites or servers in the event of problems. Software is now available that carry out these functions across multiple platforms and operating systems, it automates the allocation and reallocation of storage. When storage thresholds are approached, the system automatically reallocates storage, providing more storage where necessary and addresses the performance of the entire storage environment.

By monitoring the usage of data the Enterprise Storage Management system can migrate data used less often, creating additional capacity, as well as retrieving it simply when required. In a sense storage management functionality has been taken to a higher level.

Enterprise Storage Management falls neatly into two categories: saving the organisation's business by ensuring the availability and integrity of its stored data, an essential corporate asset, and saving the organisation time and money by helping the CIO to manage the storage requirements in an organisation with fewer resources. The cost of disasters, where data was not available to the organisation, can easily run into the millions per hour, therefore, the value of ensuring the availability and integrity of the organisation's data is essential to it's existence. An investment in an efficient enterprise storage management system is trivial, compared to the potential payoff.