Many organizations—as they adopt e-commerce, supply chain management, compliance, and other data-intensive applications—find that their data is exploding. More and more storage is needed to digitize manuals, corporate records, and other paper-based information, and to hold ever-increasing multimedia content.

If all that volume and complexity weren’t enough of a management challenge, today’s business environments demand that data be available immediately, continuously, and from anywhere—to multiple applications and to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers, business partners, and employees.