In the past few years, advances that make storage easier to use, manage, and grow have provided tremendous benefits. Storage consolidation was a launching point for various new technologies delivering advanced functionality. The next generational shift that is in process will free storage administrators from handling storage provisioning for applications - instead, applications will be able to request and provision storage for themselves. While today multiple tools are required to add storage to your database, soon the database will be able to take care of that itself.