Storage may be getting cheaper, but it's still too costly a resource to waste. That was a lesson learned by Rod Lucero, chief architect at Conseco Finance Corp., when he deployed SANsymphony from DataCore Software Corp. last year. "I lacked easy management of the storage infrastructure before, and we wasted between 35% and 40% of all storage," he says. "DataCore allowed us to drag and drop icons to allocate the storage, saved us huge amounts of time, and even allowed us to [reclaim unused] storage." That's important for the financial-services company, which has been struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Conseco has more than 14,000 employees, $38.2 billion in assets under management, and 500 terabytes of storage. Lucero calls storage a "core system" and says it's one of his basic building blocks when he designs an IT architecture. Conseco uses EMC storage to support servers running HP-UX, Linux, and Windows.

Like its competitors, Conseco is using the Internet to provide service around the clock. It needs real-time information and tough security, including identity management and authorization, to do that effectively, especially when business partners are involved. "All the back-end systems must tie together," Lucero says.

Because storage can help companies integrate back-end systems, front-end systems, applications, and data, many businesses would benefit from appointing storage architects to make better use of their storage resources and pick the best type of storage and transport technology, says Gary Bloom, chairman and CEO of Veritas, which specializes in storage-management software. Veritas plans to integrate technology gained through recent acquisitions so its software can manage and improve the performance of servers as well as storage. "We have heterogeneous capabilities without a hardware anchor," Bloom says. "Our software will reduce complexity, reduce labor costs, and make more efficient use of existing storage."

EMC Putting It Together

Profile: Leader in high-end storage gear pushes software New Products: Latest version of flagship Symmetrix system comes out this week with more modular design, plus more memory, capacity, and speed. Should keep EMC apace with rival Hitachi. Strengths: Clariion, with its 16-terabyte capacity and built-in mirroring software, leads the fast-growing midrange, modular market. Strategy: Pushing network-attached storage, where EMC was first with a "gateway" product to integrate NAS devices with storage area networks. Hints at further enhancements. Also, EMC is working more closely with storage standards bodies and making products that work better with gear from rivals, acknowledging a best-of-breed market. "It's about storage systems and software," says Mark Lewis, executive VP and chief technology officer. "How we put it together will make the difference."

That's a claim many vendors make. Hewlett-Packard has released storage-management software, called Active Management, designed to let companies provision, run, and recover data faster, says Bob Schultz, VP of marketing at HP's network-storage solutions unit. Fujitsu Software Technology Corp. promises the Storage Manager application this summer, which will "guarantee the recovery of data with whatever hardware customers have and also produce performance and provisioning information," says Scott Kennedy, VP of business development. Systems-management software vendor BMC Software Inc. plans to introduce a version of its Patrol Storage Manager this summer that it says will cut down deployment time and automate the setup and provisioning of new equipment and users.

The growing high-end capabilities of storage-management software may put it on a collision course -- or consolidation course -- with other infrastructure-management systems. But until that happens, the need for real-time data to improve business operations is pushing many companies to upgrade their storage systems.

At financial-services firm KeyCorp, "many events have to be in real time," says Bob Dutile, executive VP of technology services. For instance, the bank has customers who use debit cards at 4 p.m. and want to see those transactions reflected when they check their bank balances online later that evening.

KeyCorp, which uses products from StorageTek, also conducts business across multiple time zones and on a Web site that receives as many as 600,000 hits a day. "More and more batch processes are becoming real time because it reduces fraud and minimizes uncontrolled float," Dutile says. His goal is to eliminate "waiting three days for the wrong signature."