Efficiency and reliability
An e-commerce system will need to not only know where each document is stored, but also be able to retrieve and deliver them to customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. And, above all, the system, and its management, must be reliable.
That is why storage management has now graduated from being an esoteric subset of server technology to being one of the key components of e-business.
The increasingly central role of storage in the enterprise and the need for flexibility is leading to a new market in externally managed storage. A new breed of storage service providers is now emerging that will manage storage requirements on behalf of a company and scale up capacity as needed. In today's rapidly growing environment, it will become increasingly difficult for an IT department to accurately predict long-term requirements.
