Preface

Today’s challenges The ongoing and rapid growth of data volumes demands answers. To minimize the costs and complexity of IT operations, many IT managers try to consolidate their storage systems. But by doing this, the volume of data stored per system literally explodes. Managing the amounts of data while maintaining sufficient performance is challenging and in-creases storage administration workloads. Soaring costs, resulting from the growing complexity of operations and management of storage in-frastructures, can only be prevented with a very flexible and business-centric storage management tool that delivers efficient support for all important operational tasks while supporting business processes in an optimal way. IT managers must constantly find ways to deliver the best storage service levels to meet today’s challenges, for example: ■ More data per storage system and consolidated big data containers ■ Server virtualization with heavy impact of storage ■ Different applications with different requirements on storage perfor-mance ■ Cloud-like infrastructures ■ High speed and no interruption for reliable Business Continuity Management ■ Disaster resilience, high efficient backup and disaster recovery methods with support for always on IT infrastructures ■ Continuous automated balancing and provisioning of storage re-sources with regards to business priorities