In the current climate of decreasing IT expenditure, consolidated storage is making huge inroads into the modern IT infrastructure.

In days past, the manager who bought a server with vast storage expansion capability was seen as forward thinking. 

These days, they are seen as being extravagant, even wasteful. Modern storage capabilities are increasing exponentially. With each increase in disk capacity and performance, server storage hardware quickly becomes outdated. This leads to servers being upgraded while they are still well within their processing and memory capacity, while others barely use the ‘over-specified’ storage they were purchased with.

By consolidating storage into a ‘pool’ of available capacity, each server can be allocated as much space as it requires. This allows for a much better management of storage capacity, giving the manager more freedom with hardware platforms.

No longer does a capacity-intensive server need to consume 6U of valuable rack space. Imagine, a 42U rack with 30 servers and several Terabytes of storage that can be allocated and re-allocated as required. This is possible today with the current Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. Better still, this capacity can be increased without downtime.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity become easy events to plan for by using the remote mirror capability that SAN brings. A remote network- or fibre-linked storage mirror can be used for real-time mirroring of current data. Servers at the remote location can be used to restore service in the event of a hardware failure or the loss of a site due to unforeseen circumstances (fire, flood, explosion, etc).

To reduce costs at the remote site, VMware Virtual Infrastructure services can be used, allowing many-to-one recovery server consolidation.