Virtualized storage solutions optimize tiered storage

The changing requirements for storage solutions reflect the need for the enterprise to continually make adjustments to storage system vendors. IT managers now need a range of storage solutions that enable them to deploy a supplemental layer of networked storage systems optimized to meet the specific needs of performance, capacity, reliability, and cost.

What does IT managers need to effectively deploy, manage, and optimize tiered storage? They need many different storage systems with a variety of features and prices (most likely from different vendors) that can be layered to meet the unique and dynamic needs of different data types.

Virtualization:

Not just from physical migration to logic

As IT managers try to consolidate different storage assets (most likely from multiple vendors) for use by multiple systems and applications, the first challenge they face is to keep server and application administrators from the complexity of physically configuring, reconfiguring, and managing storage resources.

Storage solutions for these challenges must introduce a logical extraction layer (often called virtualization) between the physical ports of an array, the data blocks of a particular disk group, and the volumes or files that the application needs to access.

In addition to basic services, storage-system vendors must also provide the underlying hardware that can scale up the scalability and flexibility of a virtualized solution without sacrificing availability or increasing management overhead.

Universal Data replication:

Consistent data movement and recovery

Data replication is a key function necessary to break through existing storage system limitations and make fast data movement. The deployment of data replication capabilities, along with the virtualization of volume management, has led to significant improvements in data mobility, protection, and recovery. Can IT managers more effectively leverage installed systems and reuse them as level two storage? D? D can use these two-tier storage systems for local rapid recovery and long-term storage of fixed data without sacrificing system integrity, which can significantly reduce the total cost of the system.

Most importantly, you can also create consistent data replication and recovery policies across different storage systems. Such consistency lowers management costs while providing significant improvements in the continuous data protection of different types of enterprise information.

Logical partitions:

Adjust storage to meet dynamic requirements

The third key energy that will ultimately prove critical is the logical partitioning of a truly effective tiered storage solution. Partitions were originally developed for mainframes, it is also used in many large UNIX systems to enable dynamic and highly tunable processing of resource allocations for many different application tasks, enabling IT managers to maximize processor resources while still ensuring that critical applications have the required processing power at peak loads. Partitioning capabilities will be a feature that future generations of storage systems must have.

Storage hardware and network vendors must develop storage solutions that utilize partitioning technology to achieve dynamic allocation of all storage resources.