Enterprise storage management is the management of data and information across physical storage assets to ensure optimal utilization while minimizing enterprise risk. This note provides answers to the following questions:
- What is storage management? Storage management generally includes a number of overlapping practices and technologies including hierarchical storage management, storage resource management, information lifecycle management, and storage area network management.
- Why is enterprise storage management important? Failure to optimize the utilization enterprise storage will cost the enterprise in wasted storage investment dollars as well as increased risk of liability costs due to non-compliance with regulatory and legal challenges.
- How do we measure the value of storage management investment? Disk unit costs are only on part of total storage costs. Consider how storage management might impact true enterprise storage TCO over time. Elimination of compliance risk needs to also be considered.
A key to any storage management strategy is to focus on ensuring that storage costs are appropriate to the relative business value of the data being stored.