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The volume of electronic information continues to grow at organizations, and so does demand for storage. Every year, workers and departments produce more megabytes of new content, including text files, e-mail messages, business intelligence reports and video, and other graphical elements. Organizations are expanding resources such as data marts, as they accumulate information about customers, transactions and market trends.

Since so much of this information is critical to business operations, putting in place the optimum storage technologies is all the more important. But, improving storage management capabilities is more than just a matter of improving data access, reducing costs and adding efficiencies. Government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley have added mandatory incentives for organizations to get a good handle on their storage resources.

Several storage technologies and strategies can help organizations improve the management and provisioning of storage capacity. These include storage consolidation, storage virtualization and automated storage provisioning.

Storage consolidation involves combining data from multiple sources into a single repository such as an enterprise data warehouse. That changes the concept of storage from being a departmental resource to serving as a centralized, enterprise resource.

Consolidation has become a more pressing consideration as organizations have accumulated an ever-growing inventory of physical storage devices, often distributed in geographically dispersed locations. The growth of distributed computing has added to the rising complexity of managing storage facilities in an organization.

“Storage consolidation becomes important to me when I look at capacity utilization rates and find them to be low throughout the data center,” says Mark Bowker, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Couple low capacity utilization rates with data centers that are running out of floor space, are facing constant cooling problems and are unable to buy additional power to ‘turn on’ new systems, and we begin to see urgent problems that need to be addressed. Storage consolidation is one of the strategies that can help me when I have these types of problems.”

The potential benefits of storage consolidation include cost savings related to the management and storage of data, increased optimization of capacity, ease of management, improved reliability and better availability of storage resources. Consolidation helps organizations cut back on the number of storage systems that need to be managed and maintained, which can add to increased productivity because the IT staff has fewer storage management issues to deal with.

Among the storage consolidation architectures organizations can deploy are network-attached storage, redundant array of independent disks and storage area networks.

Enterprises can use a variety of storage virtualization technologies to help consolidate their storage resources. With virtualization, organizations create a large pool of storage, enabling multiple physical storage devices to be treated as one large repository of information that’s managed centrally.

Virtualization makes it easier to allocate storage capacity more quickly, and provides a more scalable storage infrastructure because storage devices can easily be added to the storage pool as demand requires. Because capacity is available and used as needed, there’s more efficient and less expensive use of storage.

Another technology that can help improve the use of storage is automated storage provisioning, which makes it easier for organizations to allocate storage resources.

Because storage provisioning can be a time-consuming and mistake-prone process, automating the task can lead to savings in labor costs and more accurate provisioning of storage capacity. Automated provisioning software ensures that applications and systems receive the right amount and type of storage by using predetermined rules for allocation.

The demand for storage isn’t likely to slow as organizations rely on greater volumes of information. By deploying consolidation, virtualization or automated provisioning, organizations can get a better handle on one of their most vital corporate assets: data storage.

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