A SAN island's single-purpose nature makes it very uneconomical, and the aggregate cost for storage and storage management of small SAN islands can be eye-opening. This wasn't an issue during the dot-com years when funds seemed inexhaustible, but the ensuing economic dip ushered in an era of consolidation and centralization; in other words, doing more with less. SAN consolidation has the following benefits:

• Simpler storage management
• A higher degree of storage resource utilization (capacity, bandwidth, storage controller, I/Os, storage management staff)
• Increased reliability of the storage infrastructure
• Enables tiered storage
• Simplified compliance and disaster recovery (DR) processes