Storage strategy

Sharing digital information, not paper, is the way

business is conducted today. As the need and desire to share information has

grown, Internet has been adopted as the preferred vehicle for digital

communications and information sharing. Suddenly the world, its people and its

corporations, are networked--each user armed with an arsenal of sophisticated

tools for generating digital content.

Given the magnitude and rate of change, it's not

surprising that the underlying technology infrastructures necessary to support

global networking lag the demands being placed on them. Storage infrastructures,

for example, have been significantly affected. Whether it is deep in the back

office or distributed across the globe, information must be stored and

protected. And there are already clear signs that the storage infrastructure

must change to support this need.

While storage is easily growing more than 100 percent,

staff and associated budgets are growing an order of magnitude less. As a

result, it is difficult--even impossible--for an IT department to keep pace. To

meet unpredictable growth rates, administrators are physically allocating more

storage than is used to insure that peak demands are met. Since storage growth

is exploding and the demand is so difficult to predict, scheduling planned

downtime to add storage has become increasingly difficult and increasingly

frequent while at the same time the window of opportunity for planned downtime

is shrinking. These factors result in outages that directly affect operational

service levels.

The digital revolution, underpinned by the advent of

inexpensive computing, advances in software technology and the advancement of

global networking, has created a new set of challenges for the enterprise, IT

professionals and the storage vendors which support it with new products and

architectures.

In this context, HP's new storage strategy comes at the

right time. Called Federated Storage Area Management (FSAM), this strategy

comprises of technologies that incorporate storage area management, modular

storage and storage Networks.

Federation in this context addresses the unpredictable

storage demands of modern businesses. HP's strategy seeks to enable

organizations to use all the storage resources in a given domain to manage

unpredictable events such as business discontinuity, adjustments to capacity

demand and changes in staffing.

On its part, HP will invest $ 50 million to implement

this strategy in Asia Pacific over the next nine months. And that should be of

immense help to corporates whose storage needs are growing to unmanageable

proportions.