How To Sell Storage Virtualization To the CIO

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By Dan Hascall, vice president of Americas channel and sales operations, DataCore Software

Your customers are becoming overrun with data—and those that must comply with Federal regulations are struggling to store crushing amounts of information for long periods of time. The solution is, quite obviously, to sell the those companies more storage. Here, Hascall, who has held senior level management positions at VMware, Alliance Systems, and Sun Microsystems, discusses how to get buy-in from the top for a virtualized solution.

Data that is housed in enterprise data centers is growing at an astounding 60 percent per year, according to analyst firm IDC. For CIOs, this is not good news. Furthermore, Sarbanes-Oxley compliant companies must store their data for at least seven years. The move to agile, virtual infrastructures has also exacerbated the cost and demands placed on shared storage systems. In this quandary of data storage issues, storage virtualization software has provided a much-needed grounding.

Virtual Resource Pools: Manage the growth and cost of storage as you do servers

Put simply, storage virtualization software makes it easy to pool and share storage resources just as server virtualization allows you to do the same for computing resources. It adds a new level of flexibility and responsiveness to meet user needs by ensuring that supply meets business demand. From a ‘lowering risk’ standpoint, storage virtualization software insulates users and applications from the inevitable upgrades, changes and disruptions that occur at the underlying hardware level. Storage virtualization software that works infrastructure-wide is the logical next step to complement and extend the business value of server and desktop virtualization. The combination acts as an enabler and an accelerator for businesses to fully benefit from virtualized environments, while at the same time giving users the freedom to choose the storage hardware technologies that best meet their needs and budgets.

How do you get CIOs to jump on the storage virtualization bandwagon if they’re not on it already? Learn five compelling points that make storage virtualization right for their organization. [Read the complete article]