Growth
Exponential growth of data storage requirements has been reported every year since the commercial emergence of the World Wide Web and rich media content. Organizations of all sizes have had to invest in ever larger and more complex storage systems. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions have emerged as the leading hardware approaches to meeting this exponential growth in capacity requirements.

Virtualization
Adding more hardware, however, has not sufficed in addressing the need for ever more storage capacity. The data center space available for storage systems has not kept pace with this need. The rapid increase in drive capacity has helped; but even with this growth, real estate remains a limiting factor. Storage virtualization has emerged as an important strategy in addressing this problem. Such technologies abstract the logical storage of data from its physical location. The available space on physical storage devices in a system can thereby be assigned to abstracted, or virtual, pools to which hosts (or servers) can be attached. Virtualization can result in much more efficient and flexible usage of storage capacity; it can, for example, enable such capabilities as adding capacity on the fly and changing the allocation of storage capacity to computing device on an as-needed basis.

Facilities Costs
Storage arrays take up space. Fortunately, data density on hard disks keeps increasing, allowing greater volumes of data to be stored in the same physical space. As with servers, however, greater device density can result in greater consumption of electricity. Therefore, storage management systems that enable greater efficiency in the use of physical storage capacity can affect power consumption. At the consumption levels now being seen, even incremental reductions in consumption can have a strong effect on total data center power costs.