The future of enterprise storage.

Byline: Daniel Robinson

The future of enterprise storage

Virtual storage connected by iSCSI offers datacentre managers the most cost-effective way of coping with ballooning enterprise storage requirements, according to Dell

Daniel Robinson

Enterprises are facing an ever increasing requirement for storage because of data retention policies and growing use of digital media files, according to computer giant Dell. At the same time, recent trends such as the move towards virtual machines are complicating the way storage is utilised, leading to headaches for IT departments trying to manage and stay on top of their storage needs.

Dell believes that storage virtualisation is going to play an important part in addressing this issue, and that a key part of providing this capability will be better storage area network (SAN) technology based on iSCSI. This is not perhaps surprising, as Dell is now the leading global iSCSI supplier, according to figures from analyst firm Gartner, following its acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic earlier this year.

IT managers are familiar with the fact that the volume of storage required on their network continually grows, especially as there is a need to retain certain kinds of information for future reference as well as regulatory compliance reasons. Digital media files such as photos are also adding to the burden as these tend to be large in size.