Authors: Abhinav Joshi and William J. Bender

Overview

Growing needs in both enterprise data storage and data protection have accelerated enterprise storage spending worldwide. The value of enterprise storage lies in the intellectual property contained therein. When data is stored and organized in a way that enables an organization to synthesize new information, it drives all the major business processes, applications and ultimately revenue. Business critical applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Knowledge Management, and Inventory Management add to the bottom line by using knowledge stored in the company's data. Companies are moving from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to networked storage with the adoption of Fiber Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies. The major benefits associated with this move are: higher availability, scalability, minimal interference with LAN traffic, increased management efficiency and utilization levels of about 90%, resulting in lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and higher Return on Investment (ROI). As the economy improves from the recession of 2000, and the demand for storing increasingly large volumes of data, companies are beginning to spend on IT infrastructure and storage.

In this paper we discuss the current and the emerging technology trends in enterprise storage and backup.