Many factors are causing IT organizations to look at their environmental scorecards. The rising worldwide demand for power,inherent complications of power creation and usage, the ongoing debate about global warming, and steady demand for more IT services at less cost are driving more focus on green IT. Other practical business reasons are not to be overlooked: data centers in general are running out of space, and data center sprawl typically goes hand-in-hand with management complexity and overall resource inefficiency—all of which impact bottom line.

Inefficient storage is a major contributor to data center sprawl. Traditional storage environments in particular are bulky, expensive, and complex, consisting of silos built alongside servers, networking,and power management gear. Most unified and monolithic storage systems deployed today were based on the needs of 20 years ago—before the predominance of the Internet, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the explosive growth of unstructured data. These legacy systems are not designed to accommodate such modern developments as virtualization, IT as a Service (ITaaS), and the rise of cloud computing. Instead, today’s storage environments have become isolated and inefficient, filled with underutilized hardware that can contain more unused space than actual data. Yet their disks keep spinning away, consuming more valuable resources than is really necessary.