The unrelenting growth of company files, e-mail, databases, and application data drives a constant need for more storage.

However, with storage directly attached to servers, data growth means burdensome storage management and decreased asset utilization.

Storage resources remain trapped behind individual servers, impeding data availability.

Consolidation in a storage area network (SAN) can alleviate much of the pain - but until recently, the only SAN choice was Fibre Channels, which are too costly and complex for most organizations.