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To: Gus who wrote (77)	9/25/2000 2:47:57 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 234

The application-SAN connection By Amy Larsen DeCarlo Network World Storage in the Enterprise Newsletter, 04/24/00 Much has been made about the profound impact e-business is having on corporate information technology. No longer dismissed by business managers as a mere operations component, IT is now an essential element of corporate plans to drive up profit. This elevates IT professionals to a new prominence within organizations - but with this prominence comes a higher expectation to deliver a smoothly running, reliable application infrastructure in the face of some difficult challenges. One of the direct byproducts of the explosion of Internet and other network-based applications - and one of the bigger challenges faced by IT today - is the exponential growth in the amount of enterprise data. Studies show hard disk capacity requirements are doubling every 12 months. Enterprise Management Associates recently surveyed storage-focused IT professionals who plan to implement a storage-area network in the near future and found that the No. 1 factor driving SAN deployments was the rapid escalation in capacity. SANs promise a scaleable mechanism for recentralizing enterprise data storage. Driving the need for greater storage capacity is an interesting mix of business applications. Though most of the software types mentioned by the SAN study participants are not mission critical, these applications are certainly essential elements of business communications. By far, data warehousing was the business application most affecting survey respondents' need to build a SAN, with 64% of participants naming this application as a driver. Data warehouse applications that companies use to store and correlate a vast amount of competitive data are notoriously capacity hungry. These applications are typically not classified as mission-critical ones, but they are absolutely essential in certain businesses such as telecom or petroleum, where data warehouses are used for real-time pricing for services and products. In other organizations, data warehousing applications certainly supply valuable information for long-term product and service planning, customer marketing and other sales-related programs. Ever-growing e-mail applications are also compelling companies to consider SAN deployments. Messaging applications are testing the capacity and performance capabilities of 40% of respondents' existing storage systems. Though most companies wouldn't describe their e-mail as mission critical, messaging is one of the more effective and efficient communication mechanisms used by businesses today. Consequently, keeping these applications running smoothly is a high priority for IT. Other Internet-related activities are having a direct impact on corporate storage needs. Twenty-seven percent of the participants said nonrevenue-generating Internet applications are pushing their organization toward adopting a SAN solution. These applications serve as a cost-effective marketing and customer support tool for businesses. That same number, 27%, said business-to-business supply-chain applications are a factor. These software packages can provide a straightforward and highly efficient method for fulfilling orders for goods and services. Another 25% of those surveyed pointed to e-commerce applications, which handle financial transactions between a company and its customers. Less influential are other applications, which received 14% of the vote. These include accounts payable and other financial packages, engineering software, and scientific instrumentation and engineering applications. Seven percent of those surveyed weren't sure which particular business applications were driving their company's interest in SANs. With the close relationship between storage and applications, it will be interesting to see if more partnerships form between application and database vendors and the storage companies that supply SAN equipment, software and services. There is some indication that storage vendors are interested in pursuing this type of a relationship - but do application vendors share that interest? Can the two come together to produce more effective storage solutions? nwfusion.com