2008 forecast: creating a dynamic IT infrastructure with grid storage.

Today's IT organization is getting squeezed from all directions. To support more data, storage environments continue to grow and become more complex to manage. Tighter controls on data access and management, increased compliance regulations, e-discovery, and corporate governance add to the complexity. Businesses are demanding improved services like higher availability levels. IT is also being asked to contain their spending while data continues to grow at alarming rates.

These challenges have taken their toll--IT today is bogged down with mundane, tactical tasks and has little time to focus on providing a dynamic, responsive IT service that creates strategic advantages and propels a business forward.

The business impact of these challenges is driving the advent of next-generation dynamic storage solutions that offer enhanced flexibility and intelligence to leverage resources for greater efficiency and adaptability, while reducing complexity and cost. Grid storage is a new architecture designed to address these challenges.

Grid storage architectures have evolved since the initial concepts of 2004. Today's grid storage provides a community of smart nodes cooperating to provide a set of integrated data management services. Capabilities include data de-duplication (dedup), automated management, true continuous availability, and near limitless scalability, which eliminate complexity and cost, enabling IT to manage information and not just storage infrastructure.

* De-duplication: Data reduction technology reduces the amount of physical capacity needed to store data. At just a 20:1 reduction ratio, IT can store 20 TB of data on 1TB of physical or real capacity--immediately reducing storage acquisition costs, as well as power and space requirements. Lower storage requirements also translate into lower management costs, however not all deduplication technologies are the same. Read here to avoid the pitfalls of ratio hype and understand the need to consider protection, performance and scope of storage systems incorporating de-duplication.

* Automated management: Grid storage goes beyond introducing a virtualization layer to mask tasks and their complexity by simply eliminating the task. With grid storage today's thin ...