Today's data center managers and IT departments have more on their plates than ever before. Data centers have grown in size and complexity, characterized more by diversity than by standardization. And the value of information assets has skyrocketed.

At the same time, businesses are looking to IT to help drive growth and profitability -- even as budgets and staff levels remain flat.

No wonder, then, that IT professionals surveyed by Symantec Corp. cited cost as the primary pain point they face in the data center. With little discretionary budget left to invest in the projects, systems, and applications that support new business initiatives, IT departments are looking for a way to address a wide range of pressing challenges -- while also meeting bottom-line objectives.

And their list of challenges is long, ranging from application availability to data migration and more.

The good news? Innovative tools are now available to help ease the pain of meeting data center management challenges and budgetary goals.

Application Availability

IT departments must ensure that applications are available anytime, all the time. However, there's more to application availability than simply having the ability to fail over from one server to another. Data must also be available.

In environments with one application on one operating system and one storage hardware platform, application and data availability is relatively straightforward. But in environments with several different applications running on different operating systems, running different databases, and supported by different storage hardware platforms, the challenge is much greater.

The key is to use the same toolset and processes, regardless of platform. Heterogeneous online storage management together with open systems clustering provide IT a standard set of integrated tools to maximize storage capacity across heterogeneous environments, provide data protection, and eliminate the single point of failure found within a single server. This enables organizations to reduce operational costs and capital expenditures across the data center.

Data Migration

Data migration is often a one-time activity -- repeated throughout the lifecycle of the server and the storage. IT must be able to get information off of an old system and move it to a new system, without impacting the business. This must be done for like-server migrations, heterogeneous migrations, and array migrations.

In addition to providing the same tool for all operating systems, a growing number of storage management solutions make the same set of data accessible to all major operating systems while obviating the need to use NFS or tape to move data between systems. Data is deported from one operating system and imported onto another in minutes, without creating a copy of the data or moving it. And, as applications are upgraded or migrated to new hardware, administrators can centrally manage host migrations and do a pre-migration check to verify that the server and storage connections are currently set up before the migration begins. Applications are not impacted during maintenance, and users remain uninterrupted.

Storage Capacity Management

The challenge with storage capacity is that as SANs and NAS are introduced into the data center, storage utilization often becomes suboptimal. Yet, IT departments are trying

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