Businesses today run at the speed of their information. Access to timely, robust information is a powerful asset that can fuel new ideas, boost revenues, build competitive advantage and enhance customer service.

Yet in order to derive maximum business value from information, companies must first unlock it from behind specific applications and processes across the enterprise. No one can take full advantage of information that is isolated by different operating systems and platform-specific data formats.

To drive better business results with technology, many companies are now consolidating their information. Servers are being moved into the data center. Mainframes are being blended into client/server environments. Increasing number of IT Managers are acknowledging the wasted resources, expense and negative business impact of managing information across multiple operating environments without a common management framework for the enterprise.

To realize an organizational vision of enterprise information, more and more IT departments are rejecting the notion of storage as an isolated CPU add-on or peripheral and searching for a higher category of storage. They want storage that acts as a strategic element of an IT infrastructure, bridging the gaps between disparate platforms so they can use their information in powerful new ways. Beyond simply holding information, this storage must allow companies to manage, protect, provide access to and efficiently plan the growth of enormous amounts of information previously dispersed on multiple servers and mainframes.