Building and maintaining computer systems is no easy task and information technology managers are constantly looking for better tools to reduce the total cost of managing their data centres and infrastructure. Advances in computer, networking and storage technology allow us to separate the various parts of our infrastructure to specialised platforms.

For example, storage area networks have allowed us to separate the data storage from our servers in much the same way that file servers are used to separate data from desktops and provide more robust management functionality such as centralised backup and recoverability.