Virtualize but don't forget your storage

By Loh Ching Soo, Country Manager, Singapore, NetApp | May 31, 2011

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According to analyst house Forrester, 91 percent of respondents to a recent survey are currently using virtual server technology, as compared with 78 percent last year, strongly signifying the maturing server virtualization market. Respondents in the same survey also revealed that storage remains a complicated aspect of virtual server deployments, with numerous technology and vendor choices to make.

CIOs generally agree that virtualization efforts need to cut across multiple technology areas for maximum business impact. Yet, the management of storage for the virtualized environment remains out of the grasp of many IT organizations, with many citing effective capacity management and cost control as the main challenges.

Furthermore, server virtualization itself increased data growth to more than what the existing traditional storage platforms were used to, resulting in storage platform constraints. As the use of virtual server technology for production workloads become more widespread, firms need a storage solution that can step up to the needs of a virtualized environment. Specifically, businesses need a flexible and efficient storage solution that can consolidate and simplify their IT infrastructure. 

Working Together in Sync
Storage virtualization enables IT teams to consolidate current applications and storage-area networks into one console so that it becomes one centrally manageable resource. Apart from creating IT magic together with server virtualization, storage virtualization carries its own usage and efficiency benefits as well. Below are some of the key benefits of aligning storage virtualization with server virtualization.

Lowers data center costs
Storage virtualization provides the ability to represent data regardless of where and how it is physically stored. This flexibility increases data storage utilization and can potentially realize savings of up to 50 percent on storage power, cooling, and space, thus lowering overall data center costs.

Ease of data migration
With the traditional physical tiering approach, once you have data to a certain storage tier, it becomes expensive to change. Many enterprises keep important, frequently accessed data stored on high-performing devices and data that are accessed less frequently on cheaper, slower devices.

However, it is hard to predict when which files are needed. Furthermore, tiers are difficult to manage because there is a need to continually copy and delete data, provisioning for new storage as tiers grow and shrink. Storage virtualization enables better support for multiple storage tiers, by allowing migration of data from one storage tier to another efficiently and seamlessly, without disruption to operation.

Business continuity
Enterprises can easily implement multiple storage tiers within a storage environment and across storage subsystems, migrating data from one storage subsystem to another without any downtime through storage virtualization. Disruptions to the day-to-day running of the business are prevented and enterprises can access files on the fly, improving the efficiency of operations.

Previously, the IT team would have to shut down certain drives to perform data shifts. However, with storage virtualization, IT teams can simply specify the drive’s unit number and the corresponding new location. This is important to small and medium businesses (SMBs), who need to stay competitive and typically cannot afford operational downtime. In addition, the simplicity of the operation leaves more time for IT staff to concentrate on enhancing the IT system to improve the business productivity.

One storage management environment
Storage virtualization allows heterogeneous storage subsystems to be under one storage management environment. Most storage virtualization products are also able to support multiple vendor storage subsystems under one storage cluster. This can be very valuable to SMBs, allowing them to continue using their legacy storage, while at the same time provision and administer their multiple vendor storage systems under a single management interface. It also means that SMBs have flexibility in their future storage purchase.

Enhanced scalability
A virtualized storage environment provides SMBs with the ability and flexibility to grow their storage infrastructure together with their business, enabling resources to be scaled up or down as required and with minimal or no disruption to underlying data services. This means that SMBs need not have to purchase new storage to combat any future problems of data growth, keeping IT budgets and the productivity of operations in tune with business requirements.

Ability to apply high-end functionality to low-end storage
With storage virtualization, SMBs can reap the full benefits of efficiency technologies and features such as deduplication, thin provisioning and compression for their storage needs. Such technologies and features optimize storage utilization, enabling savings by storing data on fewer systems. Consolidation also allows a single interface for managing storage across an entire organization. Coupled with automated storage management solutions, virtualization significantly increases productivity of IT administrators.

Storage virtualization future-proofs your IT architecture
The benefits of server virtualization are widely known and these include making IT operations more efficient and cutting down on IT spend. For mid-size firms, consolidation and virtualization also spell improved flexibility, greater ease of IT management and overall increase in business efficiency.

By enabling a unified IT architecture where the benefits of server virtualization are complemented by a solid storage virtualization solution, SMBs can not only maximize the potential of their data centers, they can also ensure that their IT architecture stays nimble and future-ready.