For SMO system administrators (often stretched beyond capacity themselves), storage management thus becomes a time-consuming task. And for IT professionals charged with managing budgets, a system only able to use, say, one third of its storage effectively triples costs.

Traditionally, the only available solution--as in the traffic analogy--has been to add even more storage "lanes." Indeed, because most SMO systems are managed by a small number of generalist administrators, the typical action has become replacing a full server with larger storage capacity, even though the performance and memory of the existing server are perfectly adequate.

Large enterprises have solved this challenge through the use of Storage Area Networks (SANs) and storage virtualization. The concept is simple: Storage capacity is pulled from individual servers and pooled into a dedicated storage network of its own.