Managing the lifecycle of data in the cloud and virtual environment

New technologies and ways of working are challenging traditional computing models. Virtualization and Cloud Computing are new consumption and delivery models that organizations are using to:

• Reduce total cost of ownership, with fewer servers and increased utilization of server resources
• Promote faster deployment of server images compared to physical server hardware
• Achieve greater return on investment
• Provide standardization and optimization of IT infrastructure that allows for scalability and reliability
• Provide business and IT flexibility and agility

Archiving can further enhance your cloud and virtualization goals, addressing challenges such as cost, capacity and productivity. Organizations need to consider storage disk costs associated with managing rampant data growth, along with the operational and infrastructure costs incurred managing that storage. Organizations are also challenged to meet ad hoc storage allocation needs without impacting the business. And with rampant data growth comes poor application performance, which can impact the productivity of both IT and business users.

Test teams are challenged with application quality, inadequate testing and test environments, cost, and time to market. This includes software and hardware in their infrastructure for testing. Cloud and virtualization can further help with the goals of managing your test environments.

IBM InfoSphere Optim can help support your cloud and virtualization strategy with:

• Virtualized access to archived data
• Archiving data to the private or public cloud
• Archive data within the private cloud
• Automate creation of “right-sized” test data in both private cloud and virtual environments

• To learn more about cloud computing, read Cloud Computing on a Smarter Planet (PDF, 655KB)