Virtualization will lead to efficient storage environments

Roberto Basilio, Vice President, Storage Platforms and Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems is responsible for the product lifecycle of the Hitachi enterprise and mid-range storage solutions. He talked about the future of storage virtualization and other enterprise storage trends in the offing in a conversation with Rajendra Chaudhary

Tell us about the larger CIO issues with storage today and some of the key trends in the space going forward.

Roberto Basillio

As cliched as it may sound, doing more with less has never been truer. It is perhaps the most visible trend in enterprise storage today. More data is being generated by enterprise systems today than ever before and CIOs are under increasing pressure to handle the growing data volumes without adding to the number of storage boxes in their data centers. They also have to bring in additional efficiencies in the system, provide users with fast and accurate access to data, perform data security and disaster recovery and address the ever growing number of compliance issues, all with minimal resources.

As a result of this, going forward, we believe that a number of trends will surface. In 2011, we see storage virtualization and dynamic provisioning being accepted by enterprises in a big way. These two technologies will become the foundation for the Cloud and for dynamic, highly available data centers. Whereas storage virtualization, the virtualization of external storage arrays, will provide the ability to non-disruptively migrate from one array to another and eliminate the costly downtime required to refresh storage systems, dynamic provisioning will enable storage to be provisioned in a matter of minutes, simplifying performance tuning with automatic wide striping and enabling on demand capacity for agile storage infrastructures.

We are also likely to see virtual tiering being adopted for data life cycle management saving users management hassles and costs. SSDs could see greater acceptance for higher performance and lower cost in a virtual tiered configuration and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) could be adopted for increased availability and performance in enterprise storage systems. As enterprises start to have a more mature outlook towards the Cloud, we believe that the Cloud will gain wider acceptance as a solid infrastructure model in 2011.

You say that storage virtualization will gain greater traction this year. Despite being around for long why hasn’t the technology taken off in much the same way that server virtualization did in recent times?

Enterprises didn’t quite realize the criticality or the need for it up until recently. While it’s difficult to speculate why, they might have found it easier to simply add boxes to build storage capacities. Lack of adoption was never about the technology not being there. If anything, storage virtualization technology was there well before server virtualization became popular with the advent of VMware.

Having said that, it’s about to change for good. Enterprises are fast realizing that storage is in fact the most valuable asset residing in their data centers. It’s not the servers where all their business critical information and data comes from, it’s storage, and only those organizations which can build and maintain a reliable and efficient storage will have the competitive edge. Virtualization will be the key here. If CIOs don’t virtualize, they will have far too many boxes to manage independently. Efficiency will come from simplification of all the storage assets and virtualization will help them achieve that and allow them to have fewer management points. It will also allow them to standardize heterogeneous storage environments using a set of tools, processes and procedures.

As far as server and storage virtualization go, going forward, we see a closer integration of the two as enterprises accelerate their data center virtualization efforts. While server virtualization has matured beyond the cost reduction phase of consolidating print, file, test, and development servers and is currently poised to support tier 1 application servers, going forward for supporting tier 1 applications, server virtualization will need the integration of enterprise storage virtualization arrays that can offload some of the software I/O bottlenecks like SCSI reserves, and be able to scale to meet the high availability and QoS demands of enterprise tier 1 applications.

Talking about heterogeneous storage environments, tell us about your much talked about VSP platform and the 3D scaling capabilities that it offers.

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) is the industry’s first three dimensional scaling platform, enabling organizations to scale up, out and deep for unprecedented levels of agility and cost savings in their virtualized data centers. The platform in combination with our Command Suite management software, offers best-in-class performance, capacity and open, multi-vendor storage virtualization for large businesses and enterprise organizations.

VSP’s architecture scales three dimensionally to help customers adapt flexibly for performance, capacity and multi-vendor storage asset utilization. Its data migration capabilities greatly reduce outage windows. Page-level dynamic tiering automates the page-based movement of data to the most appropriate storage media in order to simplify and optimize tier costs and performance. 3D scaling delivers extreme performance and capacity for robust disaster recovery and high availability systems including the ability to scale up to meet increasing demands of applications and servers, scale out to support multiple servers with changing workload requirements and scale deep to extend the platform’s capabilities and value to heterogeneous storage.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com