Chapter 3. The Software Spectrum

Across nearly all aspects of enterprise technology, purchasing processes have shifted from hardware-centric decision making to identifying best platforms for software and applications. Servers have essentially become commodity-driven compute engines, amassed in such volume and density that they simply become processing power enclosures. Networking equipment can easily be strung together, but only the effective monitoring and management of that information highway can tap the potential of its capabilities. Similarly with storage ”while having ample space always makes solving storage problems easier, effective use of storage resources requires sophisticated organizational monitoring and management systems.

Chapter 2, "The Storage Architectural Landscape," covered the benefits of networked storage architectures from a hardware perspective and the means to deploy effective infrastructure to accommodate torrents of corporate data. This underlying equipment, however, also must be shaped with effective organizational systems that allow data managers to minimize their ongoing administration of the infrastructure and maximize the utilization and efficiency of the overall system. Storage management software helps IT professionals accomplish this task and is the focus of Chapter 3.

With ongoing administration and operation costs far exceeding acquisition costs for storage infrastructure, IT decision makers must account for this imbalance while charting their storage networking roadmap. Careful examination of storage software components can help identify crucial costs early in the deployment phases, resulting in long- term savings. While the concepts of storage management may seem foreign at first, the underlying mechanisms boil down to simplifying organizational and administrative tasks related to storage. Keep in mind that data storage space is just another corporate asset that requires efficient mechanisms to realize maximum returns. As the overall amount of data storage increases , and the ability to assign dedicated personnel decreases, effective software tools emerge as the only viable means for corporations to gain control of their information assets.