Storage and data centre managers, in turn, are challenged to find a way to do the impossible - they must exceed increasing demands and service level expectations, while still driving down operational costs and devoting more resources to activities that will enhance business value. The demands on storage and data centres have never been greater. Data volumes are doubling every year, information and applications must be protected and available at all times, and there is no window for downtime.

Despite these challenges, IT budgets and staff levels remain flat - even as IT operated in an environment of nearly unmanageable complexity. Multiple server platforms, storage devices, virtual machines, databases, and applications are in place and each has its own proprietary tools. As such, it is little wonder then, that as much as 70 percent of IT budgets are often spent just to keep this existing environment going.

Consequently, a growing number of businesses are looking to storage and data center standardisation as a way of transforming IT from a cost center to a service organisation. Traditionally, such a transformation has not been without a great deal of risk as it typically highlights the ability to leverage an existing heterogeneous environment while restricting agility. This is not the case anymore. New technologies are now available that enable organisations to standardise on a consistent software infrastructure across heterogeneous application, database, server, and storage platforms.

With these tools, enterprises can replace the dozens of different tools they have historically struggled with and leverage technologies that share a common integration platform to finally master complexity and take back control of their storage and data centers. Making the transition to a more streamlined, standardised storage center enables enterprises to protect their infrastructure and enable IT service management process, including capacity management, configuration management, security management, availability management, and IT service continuity management.

One such tool is storage management technology which transforms the management of storage infrastructure by providing end-to-end visibility across multi-platform server and storage environments as well as new levels of control over host and storage network management. Enterprise data protection technologies are another component of a data center standardisation toolset. With these tools, administrators can efficiently manage hundreds of even thousands of backup jobs and policies from a central browser-based console. Additionally, application performance management also plays a critical role in enabling standardisation across the data center. Rounding off a data center standardisation toolset are advanced server management and clustering technologies which give enterprises the ability to not only discover in detail what is running on all servers in the data center, but also to actively manage and administer those servers and ensure that the applications running on those servers remain available.

Used together, these tools can dramatically improve an organisation’s ability to effectively manage their storage and meet or exceed service levels.

IT environments are likely to continue to include a diversity of operating systems, applications, databases, storage platforms, and more. After all, what organisation does not prefer to work with the solutions they consider best-in-class? However, all this diversity has come with a price – complexity – and some organisations have reached the breaking point, where costs have skyrocketed while service levels declined.

Clearly, the time has arrived for a new approach to managing the storage and data center infrastructure. Fortunately, so has the toolset. With these tools organisations can do, rather than simply view. Passive monitoring is replaced with actionable management. What’s more, this toolset enables organisations to replace the scores of point tools they traditionally relied on to manage individual parts of the infrastructure and instead, actually simplify overall storage and data center operations.

Reduced cost and complexity, improved manageability and control, and enhanced information and application protection are finally within reach for even the most diverse data centers. With these tools in place, organisations can regain control of their storage and data centers while keeping costs low and service levels high.

The author is CTO, Symantec India