Effectively managing storage

Storage software is an indispensable part of data storage system. The best storage software centralizes and controls the storage resources, helps reduce the complexity and costs of data storage, provides its efficient management, improves data availability, management of storage devices, monitors and tracks the performance of network storage systems e.g. in Storage Area Network or Network Attached Storage.

One of indisputable advantages of storage software products is that the installation and configuration of most applications takes usually only few minutes. Sometimes, the storage software is pre-configured for immediate use. It consists of several applications, including performance monitoring, file systems, volume management, virtualization software, file, audio, mail and surveillance managers. Its characteristic feature is that it odes not serve for storage of system files but data. The most popular mass storage devices will include tape libraries, RAID systems, hard disk drives, magnetic tape drives, optical disc and magneto-optical disc drives and older floppy disk drives. Storage devices differ from memory devices in that they retain data permanently, even when the computer system is turned off, whereas memory drives such as RAM (random access memory) does not save the data in this case. They can be used in most efficient way only with the dedicated storage software. The applications used for storage management enable a company or a private person to manage their storage system. They usually cover storage resource management (SRM) and network storage management software, performance monitoring, file systems, volume management, virtualization software and security software. Many IT companies for example open-e offer a universal tool for effective storage management. You can also find many trial versions and open source applications. They also include tools which are used for virtualisations and cloud storage. A storage software allow data to elastically grow, shrink or migrate across physical machines in a cluster without downtime, server failures or interruptions.