A simplified infrastructure controls spend, enables business growth and reduces operational risk. Simplified storage infrastructure provides improved utilisation, total cost of ownership, productivity and availability. Apex provides storage infrastructure simplification through technologies such as advanced disk technologies (DS4000, DS6000, DS8000 and N series) and virtualisation (SVC – SAN Volume Controller).

Disk consolidation addresses the following issues that are often encountered:

1. Rapidly increasing storage related costs
2. High total cost of ownership (TCO)
3. Ageing infrastructure with high maintenance costs
4. Requirement for additional storage

The IBM disk sub-systems have been designed to optimise long term customer value; hence it reduces the TCO, protects from future ‘add-on’ charges and maintenance increases and provides a scalable and a reliable base for future expansion.

Virtualisation can also address some of the above issues, but is particularly powerful if any of the following situations apply to your organisation.

1. You have installed, or are planning to install multiple types of storage arrays
2. You have storage arrays from multiple vendors which are not interoperable
3. You have high management costs of multiple disk storage devices
4. You want to improve utilisation across multiple storage arrays
5. You frequently need to migrate data between arrays
6. There is an increased need for downtime on storage arrays during maintenance

SAN Volume Controller overcomes all of these points by taking independent storage arrays and representing them as a single pool of storage. By doing this you can achieve consolidated volume management across arrays, improved capacity utilisation, and enable placement of data and copy services on appropriately valued physical storage arrays.