Storage virtualization: Avoiding the common pitfalls of five major solutions

Storage virtualization has developed into the current mainstream technology, how to avoid conventional traps before you deploy virtualization projects and find solutions. This article lists 5 key issues that you need to consider.

Gartner's recent survey shows that if you're an IT manager, chances are you've already planned to deploy virtualized storage. Nearly 1/4 vendors with no less than 500 employees have already configured storage virtualization products, while the remaining 55% plan to implement it over the next 2 years.

Storage virtualization is a different abstraction of actual physical storage using the concept of server and storage applications, typically a collection of multiple storage devices, and they are managed through a single management console.

The technology is rapidly becoming popular in the enterprise for the following reasons: In many cases, it reduces storage-related management burdens and provides better data center migration, backup, and disaster recovery models.

The Enterasys network has recently tasted the sweetness of this technology in the process of moving a data center from Boston to Andover in Massachusetts.

"Before storage virtualization, if not a full cycle process, it takes days to complete the work," said Trent Waterhouse, vice president of Enterasys Marketing. "Due to the advent of storage virtualization technology, the entire migration was done in less than 30 minutes."

However, there are general issues that storage administrators should think about and questions they should consult before deploying a storage virtualization project. This article enumerates these questions to one or two.

Management capacity

By storing virtualization technology, allocating storage is easy-or too easy to say.

"If you want, you have the ability to influence more systems throughout the environment," said Jonathan Smith, president and chief executive of Denver Colorado State Itoncommand, who cautioned that the storage and performance needs of each application should be closely watched in it stores. "You didn't have the ability in the past, and all of a sudden, you do whatever you want to do."

Smith, who uses lefthand network virtualization products on HP storage, says that at the outset, it people may see a lot of free space in a particular storage capacity and keep filling it. Overuse of a resource can degrade product performance if you are allocating storage to a database or other I/O-intensive applications.

"Make sure you need the size and really know how much horsepower your application needs," Smith said.

These additional considerations are particularly effective in the automated streamlining of configurations, where a component of virtualization technology can allocate more storage space to IT administrators than an application itself requires. This effectively eliminates the problem of excessive storage space, in some applications the storage capacity is pre-configured, but has never been used.

With a streamlined configuration, more than 100% of the storage capacity can be allocated to the application, but at the same time the capacity is still available, because it does not occupy all the space at once.

You can do this by allocating less than the physical storage or by using it for each application, and then monitoring the system closely, Arizona, State Tucson truly Nolen Pest control system engineer Themis Tokkaris said it would be great if you could find a balance between the two extremes.

"You have to monitor your database and place the data overflow because the disaster really crashes," Tokkaris said.

How do I choose the right server virtualization?

A common question is whether virtualized storage is required without leveraging server virtualization. The answer in the short term is yes-though you really don't need the flexibility of the IT store to virtualize servers and storage.

"If both are virtualized, you can maximize flexibility when deploying new applications," said Chris Saul, marketing manager for IBM storage virtualization.

However, only virtualized storage is sufficient.

Improved disaster recovery, availability, and data migration can be done without a virtual server, said Augie Gonzalez, a storage virtualization Vendor DataCore Software PRODUCT Marketing Manager. In addition, storage virtualization itself can provide an automated, streamlined configuration, a simplified management architecture, and the attendant data storage devices that are managed through a central console.

On the other side, virtualization servers are not compatible with virtualized storage. There is no need to configure multiple virtual servers on a physical machine that cannot share data, said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

"Even without server virtualization, you can get huge benefits from storage virtualization, which is hard to achieve in other ways," Peters says said.

Virtualization in heterogeneous environments

Since virtualization is used to combine multiple storage devices, its virtual effects are not obvious when your storage comes from a single vendor.

Although there are high-sounding reasons, however, storage analyst Arun Taneja said, "Many people think that storage virtualization has a prerequisite-heterogeneity, when the storage space has three companies are involved, it can immediately take effect," forget this, even if you are only a supplier of products it is very valuable.

The storage market is more monopolistic than any other it area, and it creates a problem where you can only use one storage vendor product, Taneja said.

If you are an EMC customer with 2 Symmetrix DMX cartridges, "want to combine the capacity of these two boxes and manage them as one," Taneja points out. "[without storage virtualization] You can't do that, that's the absurdity of storing the world."

This "absurd" level is exclusive to the storage market, which requires a new yardstick to manage storage from multiple vendors. caused the next problem to occur.

Select manufacturer

There are two major problems with purchasing a company, which is to buy a storage virtualization product from a storage vendor or a third party.

If your real goal is flexibility, especially if you're planning a lot of data migrations, it's a good way to choose a third party, Taneja said. Vendors like Falconstor software and DataCore have the ability to manage storage from multiple vendors at the same time, whether EMC, HP, IBM or Hitachi.

Even if you use only HP storage, truly Nolen is choosing a third party--datacore. By evaluating virtualization vendors, including HP, EMC, and Dell EqualLogic, truly Nolen chose DataCore, mainly because it was cheap, and he could guarantee the flexibility of using the hardware vendor's products, Tokkaris said.

The main storage vendors claim to be able to cope with heterogeneous environments. Examples include IBM's San volume controller, NetApp v-series, and EMC's Invista. However, as an unspoken rule, even if the vendor supports all architectures, it will support its own storage products first and then consider others.

"They will first support their own systems," Taneja said. "This means that EMC Invista supports DMXS and clariions, while other foreign devices may be supported, but support for foreign devices is delayed and will always be incomplete." The whole idea is to not support the enemy's ' box '.

Peters predicts that as storage virtualization becomes more prevalent, market pressures will force manufacturers to do more to support their competitors ' technology.

If you buy storage from only one vendor, the solution is simple.

"I told it people I talked to, if you're a Hitachi Data Systems customer and you like to work with them, stick to buying their virtualized Hitachi products to make life easier to manage," Taneja said.

Filtering through

Most storage virtualization users are not brain-smart. Who does not want to manage multiple storage devices through a single console, and liquidity to get data to make recovery easy?

Storage virtualization will be like an automatic transmission in cars in the next two years, ESG Peters believes. "Some techniques are more convenient than manual," he said.

Even storage virtualization vendors acknowledge that this technology is not an appropriate example.

Storage virtualization is not everyone's business, said Kyle Fitze, director of HP Storage markets. Virtualization actually adds a layer of complexity, and you need to manage your personal storage device, including the virtual layer, he notes. Even with virtualization, you still need to perform a reassemble device task that includes a physical disk in the storage array, he added.

As a general rule, the more complex the storage System environment virtualization brings the more profits.

"It's a complex/benefit trade-off," Fitze said. "If your current environment is very complex and difficult to manage, adding a virtual layer can reduce this complexity." But if it is a non data-protected environment that is small and highly effective, it is not a good idea to choose virtualization out of curiosity about virtualization.