Servers play a crucial role in daily enterprise operations. But even the most powerful and resilient servers are useless without adequate storage. Storage solutions contain the operating systems, applications and virtual images needed to operate every server. This eBook chapter will help you better understand your data center storage challenges. 

This document is intended for IT decision makers, planners, architects, service professionals and installers that are evaluating VDI. A moderate level of technical expertise and familiarity with VMware, Microsoft Windows Server and Desktop Operating Systems as well as HP ProLiant and StorageWorks hardware is considered essential. 

Despite progress in Virtualization, much development still remains. With predications that virtualization will become pervasive, this research highlights forthcoming challenges and strategic issues facing IT planners. 

In planning storage solutions for Oracle database applications, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems offer a range of performance and scalability options, and can be configured to meet specific application requirements for capacity, performance, and reliability. 

A thorough evaluation determined that Forbes needed a new email system and efficient storage to support it. Forbes selected Xiotech’s Emprise™ 5000 storage system, featuring patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE™) technology, which allowed the company to improve the performance and reliability of its email system, while reducing service fees. 

In planning storage solutions for Oracle database applications, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems offer a range of performance and scalability options, and can be configured to meet specific application requirements for capacity, performance, and reliability. 

The planning sequence described in this paper covers the design of the data center's physical infrastructure layer, whose job it is to house, power, cool, and protect the data center's computing and network functions. 

In a virtual server infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with an adequate amount of properly allocated resource capacity. Not allocating enough resources can cause critical bottlenecks - leading to performance problems and costly downtime events. 

Many organizations understand they need cost-visibility or a more formal chargeback process in order to further expand their virtual data centers. The challenge is where to begin and how to implement an automated solution. 

With throughput and seek times faster than disk arrays, data centers are including NAND flash as part of their server infrastructure. Fusion-io offers solid state storage solutions with NAND flash that provides integrity for data exceeding today's solid state storage solutions and surpasses enterprise-class rotating magnetic storage devices. 

This Presentation Transcript, featuring Forrester Research, explains how Software as a Service business intelligence can deliver a more cost-effective way to get relevant information to those who need it faster than traditional business intelligence can. 

Read this case study to learn how the Kentucky Department of Education is using the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology to consolidate physical servers and Microsoft® System Center solutions to streamline server management.