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Storage consolidation presents one physical, centrally managed storage system as multiple logical storage systems to multiple servers. Storage consolidation offers these benefits:
- As mentioned above, reduced administration costs through centralization of storage systems - system administrators will have fewer storage systems to manage and maintain (only 10-15 percent of storage TCO).
- Another cost savings is that you need fewer "types" of components and potentially fewer drives are needed as a result of consolidation, lowering initial and/or incremental hardware costs.
- Flexible storage allocation - the ability to dynamically distribute and re-distribute storage as needed (O/S dependent).
- More efficient use of storage - host storage can be allocated closer to required capacity and available storage is usable by any host (no wasted space).
- Storage consolidation provides the opportunity to amortize the cost of highly available, high performance storage over multiple servers or clusters.
- Storage systems and servers can be purchased independently of each other giving the end user the ability to chose the best system for a give application.
- Free up administrators time to focus on other needs of the enterprise.
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