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.