Chapter 1. Introduction

Given the high costs associated with enterprise storage in most companies, it might be easy to suspect that some dark and sinister hand is at work. By some analyst accounts, corporate IT departments are spending upward of 60 cents of every dollar budgeted annually for IT hardware to purchase storage platforms. This comes at a time when the per megabyte hardware cost for storage is declining at a rate of about 50 percent per year and the capacity of disk drives is growing (and has been since the late 1990s) at about 120 percent per annum. Given such trends, one might reasonably ask the question, "If storage is getting cheaper, why is it consuming more of my budget today than ever before?"