Business as usual? It’s history. Without question, the current economic environment is radically changing how you do business - and adding to the storage infrastructure challenges you face every day.

Budgets are tighter than ever, which means you have to thoroughly analyse, prioritise and justify every storage purchasing decision. Yet business and regulatory requirements for better, faster and more reliable information access continue to drive ever-increasing data storage requirements.

When times get tough, the tough get going - and choose storage virtualisation solutions designed to help you tackle data growth requirements and spending constraints.

Many enterprise and medium-sized businesses have already implemented server virtualisation as they move toward the next-generation data centre. Storage virtualisation is a logical next step as a way to extend the business value of virtualisation.

Consider storage virtualisation as both an enabler and an accelerator for your virtualised information technology environment.

Simply defined, storage virtualisation lets you pool and share storage resources to help you make sure that supply meets business demand. Network-based storage virtualisation provides the means for richer storage services - such as thin provisioning, replication and data migration - that can help you:

• Lower acquisition costs as you speed delivery of new applications and business services
• Reduce storage infrastructure costs through consolidation and storage tiering
• Lower staff and administrative costs with simplified, standardised management and automated tasks
• Improve asset utilisation putting unused resources and capacity to work
• Drive increased operational efficiencies for storing and protecting data

In a recent study on storage infrastructure, industry analyst IDC quantifies some of these virtualisation benefits¹, showing that through virtualisation companies can realise:

• Up to 40 percent improvement in effective capacity use
• As much as 30 percent reduction in migration, replication and backup times
• Nearly 50 percent decrease in server and storage administration time

When selecting storage virtualisation solutions, how you implement can protect you from costly system reconfigurations and storage migrations, particularly in a multi-vendor SAN environment where server virtualisation is already in play.

The goal is to pool your diverse storage assets and applications, while using storage virtualisation to simplify some of the complexities that come with server virtualisation. In this way, you can protect server and application administrators from having to physically provision, reconfigure and manage storage resources.

A network-based virtualisation solution like the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP) lets you use shared storage systems based on specific needs for performance, capacity, availability and cost-effectiveness.

This helps you to improve productivity, simplify operations and lower total cost of ownership, while making the most of existing storage and server investments.

Regardless of your current storage environment, the costs associated with managing disk arrays add up quickly.

To help keep them in check, consider looking beyond traditional arrays to the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 6400 and 8400 (EVA6400/8400) disk systems. When compared to traditional arrays, these new HP StorageWorks EVAs can help you save up to 50 percent on common, everyday storage administrative tasks.

Count on better business value, as well. With EVAs, you can lower your costs by right-sizing your storage - with easy deployment and no stranded capacity or performance.

HP StorageWorks EVA disk arrays are a proven choice for virtualised storage - with more than 120,000 virtualised arrays shipped by HP since 1994. What’s more, the new EVA6400/8400 are a natural fit for your virtual server environments. This is especially true if you use Fibre Channel storage and are looking to get the same benefits from storage as you get from virtual servers.

The EVA6400/8400 arrays are also a smart storage virtualisation choice for your Microsoft, Oracle and SAP application environments and come complete with documented best practices and blueprints for simplified integration.

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