Three big demand red storage virtualization

With the increasing popularity of virtualization technology around the world, storage virtualization is also becoming familiar and accepted, and many enterprise users realize that using this technology can bring them more convenience and considerable business benefits because of the many problems they face in the data storage and management process today, And the many requirements that their IT systems may generate in the future, need to be addressed and met through storage virtualization technologies.

Requirement One: Build public computing

In recent years, the new concept of common operations (Utility computing), driven by the trend of IT infrastructure virtualization, is being embraced by the industry and is being hailed as a future model for efficient it architectures. This flexible, efficient model provides them with strong it processing and application capabilities at the time and place they really need to avoid overcapacity, redundancy, and unnecessary costs. With a virtual layer, businesses can share computing power across a variety of business systems, reducing data center redundancy and increasing the utilization of IT infrastructure. Many companies are aware of the virtues of the new model and are putting it into action. They first optimized the IT infrastructure for consolidation and standardization, and after that, they began to enter the second phase, which was to build a dynamic, scalable computing schema, that is, to build a virtual layer to provide a variety of application tools and application guidance. Although at this stage, the focus of attention is mainly on server virtualization, but in fact, storage virtualization and network virtualization is also indispensable and need to be synchronized.

Requirement two: Reduce the storage out of control

Storage virtualization technology can not only meet the needs of enterprise development of common computing mode, it can also solve the problem that many enterprises are faced with storage runaway.

"Most of the company's IT departments are limited to optimizing storage devices because they lack the overall picture of all the equipment that the company owns," said Carl Greiner, vice president of Ovum, a market-analysis firm.

Today, these companies are aware that they need to store data on the most reliable and appropriate media, while ensuring efficiency while reducing the high cost of storage. “

Carl Greiner points out that SAN storage systems have been widely used in recent years as one of the best examples, indicating that many companies recognize the benefits of centralized storage. In fact, this practice often leads to the creation of many "islands of storage" because each department is building its own SAN systems to increase storage capacity if necessary.

According to a recent survey published by Vanson Bourne Research, 45 of the 100 corporate IT departments surveyed admitted that they were purchasing in accordance with the requirements of each department rather than the overall consideration of the needs of the company. The result of such procurement based on projects or departments is naturally the low utilization of equipment, as the procurement budgets of companies should take into account future information development and information security, rather than the real needs of the present. While many companies and their IT departments are facing a messy, unplanned, unmanageable and inefficient environment, it is imperative for them to improve the situation by using storage virtualization technology.

Requirement three: Laying the groundwork for ILM

In addition to helping organizations efficiently manage, control, and leverage storage resources, the rapid development of storage virtualization technology is also an external factor-Information lifecycle Management (ILM). The most sought-after big cake in the market is attracting millions of people, and without storage virtualization, ILM is simply impossible to talk about.

In addition, user requirements for data stability and security are also an important factor in the popularity of storage virtualization. Almost all businesses are asking service providers to ensure the operation of our data systems in the event of a sudden disaster.

The development trend of storage virtualization

While storage virtualization is a hot spot in the industry today, it's not something new, and the volume manager (Volume managers) software and RAID systems associated with it are now quite mature.

For storage virtualization technology, the real trend it faces today is to gradually evolve from the physical layer to the service layer, and many users are looking for an upgraded storage solution with this feature. In this respect, Adrian Sunderland, CTO of Griffin Business Management Services, said that virtualized storage solutions based on iSCSI and IP protocols were ideal.

Storage virtualization remains a critical weakness

In the development of storage virtualization technology, people hear not all "good" news, it still has a fatal weakness, that is, different manufacturers of related technologies and products lack of uniform standards.

At present, many it vendors have invested a great deal of money and manpower to develop storage virtualization products based on UNIX, Windows and Linux systems, and progress is gratifying. However, the standards they adopt are inconsistent, making many users who intend to apply storage virtualization technology to choose related products are often confused.

In addition, because storage virtualization is a step for users to achieve full virtualization of their data centers, users are faced with the challenges of how to develop their own storage policies and how to properly utilize them. For example, in keeping all data, but expensive and relatively difficult to query data, or only important data, relatively low cost, data query naturally easier but the results may not be completely satisfied with the choice of a balance between the two will make a lot of users headaches.

Despite these problems, the future of storage virtualization is still desirable. By more efficient use of storage resources, it will significantly reduce the user's human and cost, on the basis of the use of different storage tiers can be transferred between the data, the application of ILM technology, the resulting efficiency will be more significant. Robert Passmore, vice president of Gartner, believes that the greatest advantage of virtualization is putting virtualized resources at the software level, "and handing all the physical aspects of installation, configuration, monitoring, management, to a well-trained, experienced team of managers, This approach will undoubtedly greatly simplify business operations, storage management, and thus reduce the cost of integrated management. ”

Application case: Liverpool Women's Hospital storage virtualization for data security

The UK's Liverpool Women's Hospital employs a virtual architecture to manage its vast and complex IT infrastructure, dramatically increasing the utilization and management efficiency of its information resources, while the technical team that manages the system has only 6 people.

Zafar Chaudry, who was hired by the hospital's information management and technology manager 18 months ago, decided to transplant his experience in the United States health care system and the virtualization technology he mastered. Through his engagement with Dell, he eventually decided to adopt a VMware ESX server, 9 PowerEdge servers, 2 sets of dell/emc CX500 sans systems, and a set of PowerVault LTO tape drives. He and his colleagues have now completed the virtualization of the server, and the concentration of data storage and the ' pool ' have been completed with the basic installation configuration. All the hospital data is mirrored in the second storage area network for immediate recovery in the event of a sudden disaster.

In addition, the importance of applying ILM is becoming increasingly apparent as the hospital's medical data volume increases by 20% a year. Zafar Chaudry says: "Our storage virtualization process is only in its infancy, and it ultimately has to be tightly integrated with our IML strategy." ”

However, the Zafar Chaudry regrets and bothers that storage virtualization has so far not had a real standard.