Today’s enterprise datacenters are dealing with new challenges that are far more demanding than ever before. Foremost is the exponential growth of data, most of it unstructured data. Big data and analytics implementations are also quickly becoming a strategic priority in many enterprises, demanding online access to more data, which is retained for longer periods of time. Legacy storage solutions with fixed design characteristics and a cost structure that doesn’t scale are proving to be ill-suited for these new needs. This Technology Spotlight examines the issues that are driving organizations to replace older archive and backup-and-restore systems with business continuity and always-available solutions that can scale to handle extreme data growth while leveraging a cloud- based pricing model. The paper also looks at the role of Storiant and its long-term storage services solution in the strategically important long-term storage market.