Dell PowerVault DL2000 - Manual (Page 3)

Intelligent Data Management
December 08 Page 3
Executive Summary
Data has become increasingly valuable as both a business asset and as a competitive
differentiator. Its intrinsic value is being acknowledged in the form of stricter government,
industry, and company standards for protecting and preserving it. As a result, organizations are
generating and keeping more data than ever before, and every sign indicates that data growth
will only accelerate in the future.
In challenging economic times, this confluence of rapid data growth and the need to keep it
safer, longer has created a "perfect storm" for IT leaders, who must find resources to store and
manage all this data while keeping costs under control. To win, organizations need to
reconsider how they manage and use their data, from creation to end of life.
At present, full-lifecycle data management solutions are costly and complex. The problem is
especially acute for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which have a limited and
poorly integrated set of options for data management.
Dell's vision is to simplify IT with products, services, and partnerships that make it easy and
affordable for SMBs to manage and leverage their information from creation to end of life. We
call this approach Intelligent Data Management (IDM). IDM can change the economics of
information by reducing cost and complexity while protecting data and making it available in
ways that make sense throughout its lifecycle. Part of our IDM strategy will be a new line of the
TierDisk family of products to help SMB customers gain control of their data while reducing
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The first of these products is our PowerVault™ DL2000
integrated disk-based backup solution. Future products, including our recently announced data
deduplication solutions with Quantum and EMC, will support the goals of IDM to help IT
organizations reduce cost and complexity while giving them more intelligent products to manage
their data.
Data Management Today: Pain Points
IT leaders in organizations of all sizes are feeling the pressure of data growth and increased
regulation of how long, how securely, and how accessibly that data is stored. They need reliable
backups and restores and a way to classify data according to its use, value, and compliance
requirements. They need to be able to search this data and find what they need quickly. And
they want to be able to plan for data growth, rather than respond to it after the fact. But current
efforts to manage data typically fall short: Too much time and money are spent on incomplete,
poorly integrated, and unreliable solutions. All too often, IT managers are forced into a “keep
everything” and a “keep it forever” mode of operation. While throwing additional storage
resources at the problem will provide some short-term relief, in the long run, the management
cost of maintaining this model will be problematic.
In many organizations, responding to myriad department and user needs has created an
"island" infrastructure made up of point solutions with multiple management interfaces. An
organization may have separate vendors and solutions for tape backup, disk-to-disk backup,