There are several pressures driving the demand for more enterprise storage. New customer touchpoints are generating ever more data. Space-hungry graphic, audio and video files are making their way into data stores. Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical, and storage-dependent. And
new regulations mean new requirements for dealing with corporate data.
The good news: Moore’s Law has its place in the storage world, too. If there’s pressure on demand, there’s as much pressure on price. Component costs are falling. Less expensive fabrics are challenging Fibre Channel in the storage area network (SAN) market. And software solutions like storage virtualization make better use of existing storage resources.
In this issue of IT Business Report, we examine those trends in detail — along with some technologies and processes to help guide your storage decisions.
In State of the Market (page 6), we take a look at the demands the marketplace is making of enterprise storage suppliers — and how they’re reacting to that demand.
Our Storage By Design feature (page 11) takes a fascinating look under the hood of the storage infrastructure of the Canadian Space Agency, where a tiered storage approach is used to manage and prioritize data that’s almost always mission-critical.
Garbage In, Garbage Out (page 16) examines the increasingly crucial issue of data quality in a consolidated storage environment. And in This Year’s Model, we take a look at the product categories that will be significant in 2005.
For more storage information, visit our Web site at www.itbusiness.ca.