IT infrastructure managers at telecommunications, Software as a Service (Saas), and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) providers are under constant pressure to innovate. Customers are demanding more reliable always-on services. New kinds of applications are consuming bandwidth and petabytes of storage at an unprecedented pace. There are constant pressures to deliver an infrastructure that is better, faster and cheaper than their previous implementations. And to make it even more challenging, IT managers and storage architects must look at ever-changing application workloads, and the introduction of new storage technologies, such as flash, that are reshaping how data centers will be architected to support the huge explosion in the demand for applications and data.
The underlying networked storage infrastructure must also evolve so the infrastructure owners can continue to deliver the five nines of reliability for hosting and web services that is expected of them. Without proactively managing this changing environment, application response times will be unpredictable, outages will occur, and storage costs will spiral out of control.