The arrival of cloud computing has been heralded by hype with new IT services delivery models and ways to deliver applications to users. However, enterprise IT has been about delivery of services to application users for decades, and supporting those applications and their user groups has always been a primary concern. What cloud computing offers that is different is a model that delivers applications to users faster and with greater efficiency and scalability, and at reduced cost per application user than traditional models. Indeed, if private clouds are to succeed as an application delivery vehicle, they must be able to demonstrate time-to-market and cost efficiencies comparable to those already available from many public cloud-based application vendors like SalesForce.com and Zoho.
Applications-managed storage (AMS) is an emerging way to implement automated storage management that is linked to the application environment. As such, AMS promises to deliver automated storage management that is highly responsive to the needs of application users, thereby allowing IT administrators to manage growing storage environments with greater efficiency and lower cost per unit of storage.
