Facing the stark reality of a prolonged economic slowdown, users are looking for a number of things from their storage vendors. They want vendors they can trust, market proven solutions, and products that offer real cost savings. New rich media content is being created for everything from training to marketing and becoming a mandatory component of everyday business. Whether it’s blogs or video, content is easier than ever to create—and management will become harder than ever without significant changes. Keeping up with data growth driven by the ubiquity of content capture devices (i.e., every endpoint device), new types of applications, and richer media types requires a new approach to keeping storage costs in check. Scale-out is that approach. Enterprises that deploy scale-out solutions can get more value, dollar-for-dollar, from their infrastructure investments. Scale-out has a compelling value proposition; its lower infrastructure costs, power efficiency, and management efficiencies at scale should put scale-out solutions on the short list for anyone deploying new capacity.