Enterprises, big or small, face continuous storage challenges today. It is estimated that data volumes are doubling annually for the average company, yet industry-average storage utilization rates remain at an alarmingly low 30 and 40 percent. With budget constraints and escalating costs associated with data center space, power and cooling, it has become more challenging for IT personnel to manage storage resources.
The good news is that by adopting a more software-centric service management framework, organizations can manage their storage resources, while controlling their costs.
Improve Storage Operations
Storage administrators struggle to ensure uptime and maintain service levels in a storage environment that is constantly expanding, changing and becoming more complex. Yet, one of the most effective strategies for addressing this challenge is simple: stop reinventing the wheel.
For years, IT organizations have used enterprise software to automate business operations such as production, distribution, and customer care -- and with tremendous results in improved quality and responsiveness.
Yet, these same organizations continue to use scripts and cumbersome monitoring-centric solutions to manage their IT storage operations.
A more efficient and effective solution is to adopt a process-oriented approach to automation across the storage supply chain. This approach enables organizations to standardize their storage management processes, implement consistent operational policies, and automate them.
Deliver Storage as a Service (SaaS)
Integrating storage with business requires a global view of the storage infrastructure, with analysis at the enterprise level and capacity and cost co-related to business groupings. It also requires insight that can translate storage operational metrics into business terms and measure infrastructure against business risk and efficiency.
By mapping storage assets to the boundaries of the organization, businesses can systematically reduce risk and decrease costly inefficiencies in allocation and utilization. With an understanding of storage tier definitions and geographic and business boundaries, IT companies can implement charge-back for storage services...

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