You're probably familiar with the word 'storage'. It's a thing that you can store items in. For example, you could put your lunchbox in your friend's giant room-sized closet. You could also put your friend's lunchbox in your enormous room-sized closet if you wanted to. But what if there was a way to manage all of this storage? That's where storage management software comes in! This program is specially designed for managing storage solutions like storage networks. It provides essential services like mirroring, replication, compression, traffic analysis, virtualization, security and disaster recovery. These types of software are usually sold as value-adding options meant to run on servers and manage resources like network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Storage management is the art of keeping your data safe and sound. It's a big deal: there's no way you can get by without it. The software is used everywhere, from desktop computers to mainframes. It includes products that work on a limited or a single set of devices and those that work universally and support a heterogeneous device set. Storage management software also uses hierarchical storage management (HSM) systems, which back data from the primary storage into slower, less expensive storage devices. Storage management software is like a babysitter for your data. It keeps it safe and secure, helps it grow well, and never lets it out of sight. It watches over your data's needs, making sure they're met. It ensures that when they go out on their own, they'll be ready to take on the world and maybe even have a backup plan in case things go south. It's also like a doctor: sometimes, it can't do anything about what's wrong with your storage issues (or your data), but at least it'll give you some advice on how to handle them in the future.