For businesses, agility means the ability to react quickly to changes, for example, by rapidly bringing new services to market or adopting new business models. Throughout its history, IT has made businesses more agile. But over the last two decades, the pace at which this has been happening has accelerated to such an extent that agility is now a key business quality, needed not just for success, but often for survival. This, in turn, has increased the pressure on IT organizations themselves to be agile, and to develop and implement new applications and business processes rapidly. Since applications and processes cannot exist without data, this cannot happen unless data storage systems are also agile.

Alongside compute and networking, data storage is one of the three pillars of IT. Although storage system suppliers are reacting to their customers’ needs for greater agility, the rate at which they have done so has varied from vendor to vendor, and indeed has been a measure of their own agility. IT organizations need to be aware that their agility is impacted by a number of qualities of the storage systems on which they base their infrastructure. These qualities range from the fundamental architectural features of the systems to the business terms on which the systems are acquired or provided as an on-premises service.