Current Trends

The quantity of data stored in distributed systems has increased exponentially over the last decade. Migration of mission-critical systems to distributed environments, increases in the number of Internet and intranet applications, and general growth in the enterprise end-user community are all contributing factors. The result is that the number of storage devices in an organization increases in direct proportion to the number of client/server systems.

Recent advances in both the hardware and software required to meet the growing demands of client and server computing include new storage devices, media types, data transfer protocols, and management standards. Storage concepts, such as Remote Storage, bulk media changers and libraries, data vaulting managers, and fault-tolerant storage subsystems are being introduced by a variety of vendors.

Storage requirements continue to increase. As storage becomes more complex, administrators must be able to manage it effectively to accomplish their computing goals, both short-term and long-term.

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