Storage used to be thought of as a straightforward subject, where the only points of contention were the capacity of the media and the read/write speed of the drives. But storage is now at the heart of the crucial management issues that surround the Internet and electronic business.
Products both physical and digital are being sold over the Web. Efficient management and delivery of either the products themselves or information about them is now a business-critical function.
That is why a growing number of storage management products and services are becoming available. Some of the more recent developments can be categorised under storage area networks (SANs), while on the services front the latest trend is for storage service providers (SSPs).
SANs physically separate data from its attendant servers, giving IT managers greater freedom and choice, but there are still interoperability problems with offerings of different vendors. SSPs offer IT managers the opportunity to outsource disk capacity provision, allowing them to rent what they need -- but there could be security-based management issues to resolve.
