If you are in charge of IT at a mid-size enterprise, you’re probably about to bite the bullet to add a new Storage Area Network (SAN). Why? The simple answer is that it’s a combination of challenges and opportunities.

The investment is strategic for a number of other reasons. A SAN’s central storage pool offers better capacity utilization, easier management, and simpler backup, and not just for virtualized server environments. Standalone applications that benefit from a SAN include audio and video post production, disk-to-disk data backup, and video surveillance. Indeed, any organization that runs more than one business server application, from email to SQL to streaming servers, should consider a SAN.