Data continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Traditional transaction-processing applications continue to capture more data. Recent regulatory requirements and newer storage-intensive applications, such as e-mail, multi-media, life sciences research, and biometrics, are driving growth rates even higher. For many companies, this means adding more capacity to disparate storage systems spread throughout the enterprise. This approach is costly to manage, wasteful, and unable to deliver the quality of service – availability and performance – application users require.