Key Advantages of Central Storage Devices:

• High availability - due to central management, redundant hardware and reliability, data are better protected against failures.
• Higher rate of data processing - cache memory of the storage device; the storage network with the rate of 2 GB/s; data stored on multiple disks; the storage system software help to write and read data very quickly. 
• Dynamic management of storage space - it is possible to dynamically add storage space to a server connected to the storage infrastructure. Also data can be dynamically shared between physical disks in a central storage device. Contrary to solutions based on local disks, clients do not have to purchase the entire disk space at the beginning of installation. This is very helpful because usually it is not possible to tell at the stage of installation how much disk space would be needed or what would be the disk load.
• User-friendly backup and recovery - different strategies can be used with data array backup and recovery: quick backup and recovery with ShadowImage or Copy-on-write Snapshot; backup through the backup server without loading the production server; backup to the tape array without loading the data network. 
• The option of system copies in the storage device - this functionality is necessary when creating and synchronizing test and development environments and with version and functionality updates.
• The option of cluster solutions - only central storage devices enable disk space that would be accessible to multiple servers at the same time.
• The option of manual clusters - a spare server is connected to the storage network which is run in case a failure occurs in a production server