What is the best solution for storage virtualization?

As a basic concept of it, "virtualization" has been used for more than 30 of years. However, virtualization has blossomed in recent years as a technology that directly helps enterprise users reduce IT costs, improve competitiveness and profitability, and bear fruit in the storage and server sectors.

With the storage virtualization technology, it is more and more mature to integrate the existing storage resources of enterprise users and manage them more effectively, so as to greatly improve the utilization of storage resources. So how does storage virtualization provide greater benefits to enterprise users? What is the best choice for a business user with a virtual storage solution?

Before we seek answers to the above questions, we should first be clear about who is most qualified to answer these questions. In the face of complex enterprise IT systems, only a comprehensive storage and server product line provider has the ability to provide virtual storage solutions for heterogeneous environments to be eligible to answer these questions. Because only such providers have a panoramic view of the enterprise storage System.

What is the secret of virtual storage?

Storage virtualization is the abstraction of storage hardware resources. This virtualization allows users to isolate a large amount of physical features from storage resources, as if we were to store or extract items in a warehouse, as long as we were dealing with the warehouse keeper without having to worry about where our items were stored in the warehouse. For users, virtualized storage resources are like a huge "storage pool" where users do not see specific disks, tapes, or what path their data passes through to which particular storage device.

From the management point of view, the virtual storage pool is centralized management, and the storage resources are dynamically allocated to each application according to the specific requirements. It is worth noting that virtualization technology enables the use of disk arrays to simulate tape libraries, providing applications with storage resources as fast as disks and as large as a tape library, which is today's increasingly extensive virtual tape library (VTL, Virtual Tape library), Plays an increasingly important role in today's enterprise storage systems.

The benefit of making storage resources virtual into a "storage pool" is to consolidate many fragmented storage resources to improve overall utilization while reducing system management costs. The resource allocation function associated with storage virtualization has the ability to partition and allocate resources, and can divide the pooled storage pools according to the requirements of the Service Level Agreement (Agreement), with the highest efficiency, Lowest cost to meet the needs of various applications in terms of performance and capacity. Virtual tape libraries, in particular, have a significant impact on improving the level of application services, such as backup, recovery, and archiving, which greatly saves time and money for businesses.

In addition to the time and cost benefits, storage virtualization can also increase the overall performance and availability level of the storage environment, thanks largely to the "dynamic management and allocation of storage resources in a single control interface."

In today's enterprise operating environment, the data growth rate is very fast, and the enterprise management data ability to improve the speed is always far behind. Through virtualization, many time-consuming and repetitive tasks, such as backup/restore, data archiving, and storage resource allocations, can be automated and significantly reduce manual operations. Therefore, by incorporating data management into a single automated management system, storage virtualization can significantly shorten the gap between data growth and enterprise data management capabilities.

The best way to store virtualization

The introduction of virtualization technology into the enterprise IT architecture can be achieved in four ways, each with its advantages and disadvantages:

First, server-based virtualization, which is running virtual storage software on a server. This is the easiest way to do this, but the server can take the processing power out of running virtual software, thus impacting the overall performance of the enterprise IT system and causing the entire system to go down because of a server failure.

Second, the "Out-of-band (Out-of-band)" virtual engine, also known as asymmetric virtual (asymmetric), is a virtual function implemented on a server outside the data path, which is the transfer of control and storage data to different data paths. This approach reduces traffic in the storage Data network and helps improve system performance, but typically requires the installation of specialized software and is vulnerable to attack.

Third, the "in-band (In-band)" virtual engine, often referred to as symmetric virtual (symmetric), is the implementation of virtual storage within the application server and stored data paths, the control data (Metadata) and the actual data that needs to be stored in the same data path. In-band Virtual storage has a strong ability to work together, and it is easy to control through centralized management interface. At the same time, in-band virtual has high security, it is difficult for hackers to invade the storage system. However, at the server level, in-band storage consumes more data network bandwidth to transmit control data, so it is easy to generate performance bottlenecks between servers and storage devices.

Four, virtual storage based on storage switches and memory. This approach to virtualization directly on the storage device is relatively easy to achieve, while it is transparent to both users and administrators, thus providing a great convenience for user and administrator management. However, there is currently no uniform standard for such devices, which means that storage products from different vendors are difficult to integrate seamlessly into a single storage system.

Since there are so many ways to implement storage virtualization, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, this requires enterprise users to focus on their specific situation and choose the most appropriate way.