Another challenge is that while data volumes continue to hit the roof, IT managers still need to meet demands such as supporting new and existing applications and users so that the business remains competitive, managing risk and ensuring business continuity and maintaining compliance with government regulations and specific industry standards.
 
There is a strong argument that organisations need to stop buying more capacity and to look at ways they can consolidate their existing estate, increasing utilisation while improving data replication and migration and reducing costs. Storage virtualisation is an increasingly popular way for organisations to address these challenges. It allows organisations to gain control over their infrastructure, extend the life of their existing assets and achieve cost-effective business continuity and data protection.

Storage Virtualisation Benefits
The benefits associated with virtualized storage are due to two improvements in storage management. First, management tasks are simplified and streamlined by underlying software automation, which enables fewer storage managers to oversee larger pools of storage. Secondly, storage resources can be better utilized due to improved management. Without virtualization and pooling, storage managers over-provision storage resources to make sure that they were sufficient. Virtualized storage enables better utilization of total resources and eases the task of migrating data among different storage assets in a multi-tiered storage system. These benefits contribute to a reduced total cost of ownership. Put simply, the economic drivers are fairly straightforward: reduce costs without sacrificing data integrity or performance.

The amount of data companies store is skyrocketing. The growth of unformatted data is fast, email being a prototypical example. Businesses, however, cannot increase their numbers of administrators in proportion to the amount of data. This creates a need to change to an architecture that makes it possible to increase the amount of data managed per operations technician. As factors such as these prompt changes to the storage environment, there are a growing number of situations where building a SAN alone is not sufficient in terms of efficiency and system flexibility, and a virtualized solution is needed. Virtualized storage addresses typical enterprise concerns in the face of growing business challenges like manageability, scalability and availability--- reduces downtime due to failures or configuration changes.

An important objective for storage virtualization is to overcome vendor interoperability issues. Storage array manufacturers comply with the appropriate SCSI and Fibre Channel standards for basic connectivity to their products. Each, however, also implements proprietary value-added utilities and features to differentiate their offerings to the market and these, in turn, pose interoperability problems for customers with heterogeneous storage environments. Storage virtualization products can be used to provide data replication across vendor lines and replicate data from higher-end storage arrays with much cheaper disk assets thus addressing both interoperability and economic issues.

In addition to streamlining storage management tasks, the right storage virtualization solution can make management of multi-tiered storage systems practical as uniform, non-disruptive procedures replace point-to-point, disruptive procedures. Without virtualization, moving data sets from one tier of storage to another is challenging. It is a disruptive process, demanding some amount of scheduled outage, plus the risk of unscheduled outage if something goes wrong. Some degree of virtualization is necessary to make multi-tiered storage systems practical and functional.