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| August 27, 2010• Vol.32 Issue 18 | ||||
| There's no doubt that virtualization has changed the face of today's data center. Virtualization means less hardware, less money, and increased IT efficiency, and the technology and its benefits are starting to trickle into other areas of the data center. We've seen and heard a good deal about server virtualization, and now storage virtualization is becoming more mainstream in the data center, as well. Here we'll discuss why storage virtualization is important for the small to midsized enterprise, see what's in store for the technology, and get a glimpse of how it will change in the coming years. | ||||
| Important Technology | ||||
| Managing data growth is a challenge faced by companies of all sizes, but it is particularly acute for small to midsized enterprises, according to Kathleen Ferraro, vice president of product management and marketing at F5 Networks (www.f5.com). “These organizations are experiencing data growth and growth-related headaches at a level similar to their larger peers, but often with much smaller IT budgets and fewer staff resources,” Ferraro says. “Storage virtualization can help these companies by not only lowering the per-gigabyte cost of storage capacity, but also by simplifying many of the data management tasks that currently consume their limited IT resources.” Fadi Albatal, vice president of marketing at FalconStor Software (www.falconstor.com), says storage virtualization provides the cost-conscious small to midsized enterprise a way to consolidate resources, to create a more efficiently utilized storage environment, and, ultimately, to reduce IT costs. “Once a consolidated, virtualized storage environment is in place, IT managers can deliver a host of differentiated storage services, including data protection services such as backup and replication for disaster recovery, at significantly reduced cost,” Albatal says. A Changing Technology Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president, and CEO of eG Innovations (www.eginnovations.com), says that in terms of the changing storage virtualization landscape, he believes there will be a similar parallel to how server virtualization has evolved. “A few years ago, the focus with server virtualization was on the hypervisor,” Ramanathan explains. “Today, the hypervisor is a commodity. All the virtualization companies are focused on manageability to deliver the cost savings and the agility that enterprises are after. In my view, storage virtualization is a few years behind server virtualization in its maturity cycle.” Although server virtualization has become mainstream, Ramanathan says storage virtualization is not yet to that point. “The focus is very much on proving that the technology works now,” he says. “A few years down the road, manageability will become important—how do you get the most out of your existing hardware, how do you dynamically move storage across VMs on different hosts, etc.” Galvin Chang, associate director of Infortrend Technology (www.infortrend.com), says the first stage of storage virtualization is to provide an appliance that can aggregate and process I/O commands of storage hardware from different vendors. In the next stage of storage virtualization, Chang says he sees the following issues as being important: scale-out storage, tiered and virtualized storage, virtualized storage for cloud data centers, and load balancing. According to Chang, using scale-up storage in a virtualization environment can only increase capacity and results in waste of previous investments; only scale-out architecture can unleash the storage performance and benefits from virtualization. (For more information on scale-out storage, see the “Introducing Scale-Out” sidebar.) Chang also says that virtualized storage should provide different service levels of storage management, including SSD, SAS, SATA, and even VTL. For cloud services requirements, Chang says virtualized storage offers several benefits, including scalability, data management without downtime, and lower costs. He says another key issue will be how to balance the workload of controllers and host bandwidth when multiple storage controllers are introduced into a virtualized storage pool. “Vendors should implement intelligent host agents or leverage network layer protocols for load sharing,” Chang notes. Technologies & Trends What are the current, hottest technologies and trends related to storage virtualization? According to F5’s Ferraro, data deduplication and cloud storage are two to watch. “Because data continues to grow at such a rapid rate, businesses are constantly looking for ways to further lower the costs of storing that data,” she says. “Storage virtualization is a key enabler of these technologies because it reduces two of the primary hurdles for their adoption. Storage virtualization can not only automate the manual process of identifying data suitable to be stored on these types of storage, but it can also move that data without disrupting users and applications, according to predefined policies.” According to Albatal, a few exciting new technology trends include homogeneous data protection services in heterogeneous virtual storage environments, the use of SSD technology to accelerate SAN performance, and the automated migration of data throughout the storage infrastructure based on QoS (quality of service) requirements. “Storage virtualization will be widely adopted as a best practice through the IT world, and the virtualized SAN will become the de facto standard of how to deploy and manage storage environments,” he says. Albatal says SMEs can expect to see more offerings of heterogeneous storage virtualization solutions as well as support for new protocols, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet, that provide high-performance services over IP. In Ramanathan’s opinion, a good deal of focus is going into where virtualization will be implemented—host-based, network-based, or storage-based. “All of these choices have their own pros and cons,” he says. “There is also a lot of emphasis on allowing storage virtualization to consolidate heterogeneous storage systems into a common storage pool, with common management, common protection, etc. The goal of storage virtualization is to give you a choice in selecting storage arrays from different vendors and providing you with enterprise features like dynamic provisioning and dynamic data migration.” |
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