SANs Drive Innovation And Aid Data Management

Companies want to grow their data stores with the intent of mining them to drive profit and innovation and to better serve their customers. Storage area networks are the platform IT shops use most often to consolidate data from distributed sources to support these initiatives.

The need for better information management has pushed the annual growth rate for stored data to an average of 63% in the last two years. According to Enterprise Storage 2003, a study conducted by InformationWeek, Network Computing, and SG Cowen, demand is expected to grow at an annual rate of 57% over the next two to three years.

Here's how companies now stack up: Those with less than $100 million in annual revenue have 13 terabytes of data storage installed. At sites with revenue of $1 billion or more, the amount is 52 terabytes.

But why choose SANs to drive innovation and better data management, considering the high cost of tying Fibre Channel interconnect over an existing IP infrastructure? First, lab tests suggest that SANs perform better than alternative methods such as operating only over IP. Second, with stored data increasing exponentially, using a SAN is a common way to scale up operations. SANs also offer rapid access to data, better storage-management options, and easier control of routine backups, compared with direct-attached storage. Disaster-recovery implementations can be easier with SANs. Some configurations also provide the ability to perform data copying for backup purposes without taking up host computer processing overhead.

To find out more about how SANs are being used to house data accessed by digital dashboards in business-intelligence deployments, join InformationWeek editors and IT executives Aug. 26 for a one-hour Editorial Perspective Webcast. Send an E-mail to the address below for more information.

Peter Weiss
Senior Managing Editor, Events
[email protected]

Software Choices

Which storage software does your company use?

Three in five businesses use storage-management software. While just 29% of 654 respondents use storage-resource-management software, this is expected to change in the next two years as more companies look to reap the economic benefits of this type of software, which can give an accurate picture of the amount of storage available.