In architecting the ETERNUS DSP series the fundamental goal was to provide customers the ability to autonomously adapt and compose the infrastructure to precise application needs, via the unique ability to concurrently and seamlessly manage heterogeneous hardware and media, present or future, unlike any other storage system in the market. We enable customers the ability to “live” change the system in response to both failures, and more importantly, events that improve the applications that ETERNUS DSP series is supporting. Enterprise storage software must strike a balance between delivering availability, performance and scalability along with data agility and developer velocity. This white paper describes the choices, advantages and trade-offs we made in delivering the attributes of Enterprise Storage while revolutionizing the ability to scale, manage and change the system.