For businesses around the world, data volume is growing exponentially. Each day, companies gather and store more information to meet business and regulatory requirements. It all adds up to exploding data growth—and persistent storage problems.

Historically, smaller and midsized organizations have met the data challenge simply by buying additional servers with attached disk storage. Larger organizations have deployed storage area networks (SANs) and started to propagate their data centers with monolithic dedicated storage systems. While this stopgap approach solves immediate storage needs, it just delays the long-term solution. It leaves you with islands of storage, each dedicated to different applications. When you continually add storage devices, you increase data management complexity and drive up capital and operations costs.

For most businesses, this legacy IT strategy is not only costly, it’s unsustainable. Clearly, a new approach is needed. That new approach is storage virtualization. Storage virtualization allows you to meet the challenge of exponential data growth in a manner that reduces operational costs, improves efficiency, gives you an expanded choice of hardware vendors and extends the life of your existing storage assets.