Storage Consolidation

Definition

The processes of centralizing the storage infrastructure resources of multiple servers to reduce management costs, achieve better service levels, and strengthen control over data.

Key Points

In small scale IT systems, each server has its own dedicated storage infrastructure (internal disks or DAS). However, as server numbers and the amount and importance of business data stored in the storage infrastructure increases, managing such dedicated storage infrastructure resources per server becomes difficult and expensive. To solve this problem, the dedicated infrastructure resources of servers are centralized to storage infrastructure resources shared by all servers, using storage networking technologies such as SAN and/or NAS.

Once dedicated storage infrastructure resources are consolidated to SAN and/or NAS resources, storage management operations can also be consolidated and centralized. For example, data backup is performed only once for the consolidated storage instead of...