Vendor Accent

Storage with intelligence

Storage virtualisation is the latest tech industry catchphrase, especially with the increased acceptance of storage networks, says Ajaz Munsiff in part one of this two-part series

Expectations are being created around universal management of multi-vendor storage and various other promises to provide the answers to all of today’s storage challenges. There has been a lot of confusion, debate and rushed-to-market solutions with many companies trying to jump on the bandwagon, or at least not get left behind.

The buzz in the industry is justified as virtualisation has a number of potential benefits. Virtualisation greatly enhances the capabilities of storage administrators, whose ability to manage storage with a comprehensive virtualisation and storage services toolset significantly drives down storage administration costs. A storage virtualisation solution eases the task and cost of storage capacity planning. It allows usage of heterogeneous storage, empowering enterprises to leverage their current infrastructure and to make future purchases based on the best choices available rather than being tied to homogeneous proprietary storage offerings.

Virtualisation makes the implementation of enterprise-wide storage management a dream come true. It can provide enterprise-wide manageability, allowing storage systems to be constantly available and scalable to meet future needs. It allows easy storage space reallocation with minimal impact to application servers, diminishing downtime and allowing enterprises to do business at optimum intensity, 24x7. Virtualisation is also fundamental to enabling business continuity functionality, such as mirroring and remote backup. With proper implementation, storage virtualisation can yield tremendous cost savings and other vital benefits to today’s enterprises.

Search for proven solutions

Customers are seeking proven solutions for better utilisation of disk resources, high availability and disaster recovery, snapshot and replication for rapid recovery and the central management of storage.

Point solutions exist for many of the above storage demands, but customers are increasingly under pressure to consolidate management and applications to save time and money. This consolidation, not just of storage itself, but also of storage management and applications, is what is really driving the new storage market.

However, virtualisation isn’t for every storage environment. To figure out whether it’s a good fit for a particular organisation, the organisation will have to understand the various types of storage intelligence and where they exist in the network—on appliances, routers, gateways or switches—and determine which implementation approach best suits their needs. Then the organisation could proceed with questions for specific vendors. Corporations seeking to consolidate and manage storage must consider the underlying implementation of a virtualisation product, and how disruptive—or non-disruptive—it is to their environment. They must ask the difficult questions.

Questions to ask

What are my business needs?

The real challenge in setting selection criteria is figuring out what an enterprise’s business-specific needs are. Factors such as bandwidth, response time, and required physical connections must be determined. Available support staff and technical competency also play critical roles. At the same time, many companies are struggling to disentangle themselves from proprietary vendor specific environments, IT professionals have realised that true virtualisation enables the recognition and control of storage devices from different vendors.

Is the technology flexible?

Since one-size-never-fits-all in enterprise storage, a virtualisation solution should be flexible enough to handle SQL, Oracle, Exchange, SAP and a multitude of other data sets and network configurations.

Does it deliver real value?

Virtualisation alone gives you nothing more than volume management and disk sharing. Does the platform provide a solution for snapshot, replication and mirroring? Does it lend itself to central management and control?

Is it scalable over the long term?

What can virtualisation can do for one application on one network segment may be significant, but can the enterprise leverage the technology across the entire network and all storage? What is the true cost of going from a pilot programme to a full-blown enterprise-wide solution? Does it accommodate future technologies and applications easily? What impact will it have on network performance? Will it accommodate growth in storage and provide the best possible platform for continued disaster recovery and business continuity for the majority of the enterprise applications?

Business continuity is spreading its wings. The trend toward Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has helped companies realise that it is not just their core business data that should be protected by disaster recovery implementations. E-mail, document processing, customer response management and other mid-level applications are increasingly recognised as mission-critical within the organisation and, therefore, are candidates for DR and business continuity processes.

What should it do?

There are also some key challenges of storage virtualisation which need to be addressed to avail the benefits. In terms of scale, since virtualisation technology aggregates multiple devices it must scale in performance to support the combined environment. In functionality, it masks existing storage functionality, therefore it must provide required functions, or enable existing functions. In terms of management, it introduces a new layer which must be integrated with existing storage management tools. Lastly, on the issue of support, it adds new complexity into the storage network, hence requires vendors to perform additional interoperability tests.

The author is Product Marketing Director, EMC South Asia. He can be reached at Munsiff_Ajaz@emc.com