2007 year in review: mid-market storage management strategy trends

Mid-market storage management was affected by several key trends in 2007, including:
1. Continued exponential growth in the volume of information that mid-market companies must manage, protect and keep accessible,
2. Further dispersion of that information across heterogeneous and physically distributed computing infrastructure,
3. Increasing pressure to comply with legal and regulatory mandates regarding corporate and customer data.
Workforce decentralization has resulted in the profusion of data scattered across servers, desktops, and laptops in multiple offices. This has made it more difficult than ever for mid-market companies to manage, protect and ensure timely recovery of critical business information in the event of a disaster, and to fulfill compliance requirements.

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In addition, IT staff accountability for ensuring business continuity continues to drive interest in disaster recovery technologies. More and more mid-market companies are looking to put dependable DR plans in place.
Fragmented approaches to managing storage that treat every device and/or application separately no longer work under these conditions. Instead, mid-market companies need to be able to define storage management policies centrally and implement them across the company.
For this to happen, mid-market companies need storage management solutions that are comprehensive (that is, that address all types of data on all types of devices across the organization) and integrated (that is, that allow all this disparate data to be managed in a common manner). Vendors are responding to this market need by delivering solutions that enable implementation of holistic data management, rather than just a limited set of 'point' products.
Storage management vendors have also had to respond to their customers' growing embrace of server virtualization which requires backup and replication solutions to incorporate some new functionality to support it.
Frank Jablonski is the director of Product Marketing for CA's Mid-Market and Storage Business Unit www.CA.com