"When it came to managing most of AOL's 6 petabytes of data, a Fibre Channel SAN sufficed. But for its most critical relational database, AOL found that the SAN was too constrained and caused its IT shop to fail to live up to its service level agreements with business units more than 50% of the time. After investigating what may have been causing I/O bottlenecks, AOL found the problem was back-end storage.

Google has been offering its Gmail web-based email service for quite a few years now. The service has proven to be very popular with users and has grabbed a significant portion of the market despite the fact that Gmail only recently graduated from beta status.

InformationWeek reports that Gmail has passed AOL to become the third most popular email service online. According to ComScore Gmail grew its monthly visitors in the U.S. from 25.3 million in July 2008 to 36.9 million in July 2009.