Information On Demand   by Christine Harrell

In today's competitive and growing business environment, information is an increasingly valuable, but costly organizational asset.

The volume of information is growing very rapidly in most organizations and the need to protect and manage information also continues to increase. Organizations are seeking to minimize risk, reduce costs, and increase flexibility by aligning IT investments according to information value and business needs.

With information on demand, business can respond with flexibility and speed to customer requirements and market opportunity.

Getting there involves three aspects: Infrastructure Simplification (IS): Simplification of the underlying IT infrastructure and its management to lower the cost and complexity. Business Continuity (BC): Assuring security and durability of information. 3. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM): Efficiently managing information over its lifecycle.

Infrastructure Simplification Infrastructure simplification is a process by which organizations contain expenses, enable business growth, and reduce operational risks by optimizing IT resources. Simplified infrastructures hold the promise of improved system optimization and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), higher personnel productivity and greater application availability through infrastructure resiliency. Once simplified, the infrastructure can be better managed for lower cost and with fewer errors.

Consolidation IBM TotalStorage products can help consolidate the storage environment. With fewer elements to manage which can increase resource utilization and simplify storage management, this can provide the ability to share storage servers over extended distances and provide economies of scale for owning disk storage servers. There are four main methods of consolidation: centralization of data centers, physical consolidation, data integration and application integration.

Virtualization Virtualization of physical resources is an essential part of a simplified storage environment. They are more flexible since the logical files and disks can be manipulated more easily than numerous individual physical disk and tape devices. Virtualization can further improve resource utilization, simplify storage management and accelerate application deployment with improved resource sharing

Automated Management Understanding the environment and managing it cost-effectively is essential and IBM's automated management software can help doing that. IBM storage management products help with understanding how storage is configured and used and in easily making changes to improve the storage network. Many tasks - such as provisioning new storage - can be simplified to a single step using our advanced automated management software.

Business Continuity The business climate in today's on demand era is highly competitive. Customers, employees, suppliers and business partners expect to be able to tap into your information at any hour of the day from any corner of the globe. If you have continuous business operations, then people can get what they need from your business-helping bolster your success and competitive advantage.To achieve all this, you need a comprehensive Business Continuity plan for your business.

High Availability is achieved by means of fault tolerant, failure resistant infrastructure supporting continuous application processing. Continuous Operations imply non-disruptive backups and system maintenance coupled with continuous availability of applications. Disaster Recovery means protection against unplanned outages such as natural disasters through reliable and predictable recovery methods.

Information Lifecycle Management Information has become an increasingly valuable asset. But as the quantity of information grows, it become increasingly costly and complex to store and manage. Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a process for managing information through its lifecycle, from conception until disposal, in a manner that optimizes storage and access at the lowest cost. For small and medium-sized enterprises, predicting storage needs and controlling costs can be especially challenging as the business grows.

About the Author

Author is a writer for Sunstar Co who specialize disk storage and backup solutions. For more information you can visit http://www.sunstarco.com.