Storage consolidation is the practice of simplifying the storage infrastructure, allowing storage administrators to increase organization of and control over their storage resources. The need for storage consolidation stems from the fact that storage needs keep growing--as much as 100% per year in some organizations.

Storage managers need to know how to purchase products for their storage consolidation initiatives. This guide covers purchasing criteria and product specs for consolidation technologies such as NAS, disk arrays, data migration tools and virtualization software.