Storage Virtualization: What's the big deal?

Storage vendors are on a roll these days, talking about virtualization and how it is the next big thing to happen to the IT world after Linux. And organizations have caught on to the magic word and want to migrate their existing infrastructure. For a solution provider, this could open a whole host of opportunities. But before you jump onto the bandwagon, learn how virtualization will benefit your customers and what guidelines to follow while making this storage transition.

Almost all leading storage vendors, including EMC, HP, Hitachi and IBM, are propagating the concept of storage virtualization. To better understand this concept, let's first take a look at the business challenges faced by companies. All organizations are on a growth path and want to take their products and services to the market in the shortest possible time. 

At the same time, they have to ensure that the right people in corporate hierarchy have immediate access to relevant information. And all of these processes should have measurable results, from operations to sales. 

Now let's look at the IT challenges that face these companies. As the business grows, there is an explosion of data. At the same time compliance to standards and security become major issues. As it embraces new technologies and systems, the infrastructure complexity increases. And if the infrastructure backbone is inflexible,
storage management becomes a cumbersome task.

Now crunch these figures. Disk storage in enterprises went up from 5 terabytes (TB) in physical storage during 1996 to 50 TB in 2002 and is likely to be 225 TB in 2007. Rather than focusing on the increasing on numerical increase, consider the data growth rate. It is obvious will make it difficult for a solution provider or a CIO to manage infrastructure, space, people and costs. 

At the same time, storage related expenditure as a percentage of the IT budget in these very enterprises has gone up from 11% in 1996 to 17% in 2002. 25% of the IT budget is expected to be related to storage by 2007. This poses another challenge for the CIO because if he continues to invest in storage, he will have relatively lower amount to invest on other technologies. Also, when storage needs grow it is difficult to keep the prices of managing that data flat or even lower it.

Exploring advantages of virtualization

Virtualization addresses most of the issues outlined above. In fact Andy
Manshow, GM, IBM TotalStorage believes that it will become the de facto standard in a couple of years, which is why the vendor has coined a term for its virtualization strategy, calling it 'On-Demand Business'. "Virtualization will do to the storage business what Linux did to the server business," Andy noted.

Steve Legg, Chief Architect, IBM TotalStorage defines virtualization as the separation of the logical representation of a resource from its physical implementation - improving flexibility and simplifying management. This technological concept will lower
TCO. Currently initial purchase price of storage is significant with software and maintenance. And over four years the TCO will thereby increase. Also, with multi-vendor disk environment come problems like multi-path drivers. For instance, there are chances of incompatibility while loading of two different device drivers on the same application device. 

Management of software is relatively easier with virtualization, as there will be an open standards-based architecture. 

Traditionally, when there is different software there are varying levels of complexity. It also results in improved application availability. In a traditional SAN, to make application changes, a solution provider has to stop the application, move the data, re-establish host connections and then re-boot the application. "All this is time consuming and there are great chances of making mistakes-expensive mistakes," pointed out Steve Legg. In a virtualized environment, the data can be shifted to the requisite device, without intimating other applications.

Technology cornerstones

Before going all out for virtualization, ensure that you have some technology cornerstones in place. Firstly, it should be based on open standards and CIOs and solution provider should drive their storage vendors to bring this about. 

This will ensure that vendors too are participants in a client's IT infrastructure and also to make the solution vendor-neutral. Such a scenario ensures that the client can make changes to the infrastructure independently without reliance on any particular vendor. Automation is another aspect that has to be taken into consideration. The solution should ensure that the client can do anything on the backend of his infrastructure without any disconnect with the front end. 

Having these cornerstones in place will ensure that the client haws the flexibility and the choice to improve integration and access. Also, human errors can be eliminated as virtual master craftsmen will create the workflow while monitoring systems will trigger workflow execution.

Understanding data

Understanding the data is also important before deciding what has to be done with it. This means that data has to be categorized. So you have valid data that conducts transactions and generates revenues. Next is stale or orphan data, which does not generate revenue and was probably created at sometime and was never used after a brief period of time. 

There is also redundant application data, which are typically the logs and temporary files that get created on the usage of every application. Lastly, there's duplicate data. This could be the same information residing on several systems.

All these data take up a lot of storage space. Therefore it is important to categorize it and prioritize which are the most business-critical. Place this on a high-cost storage environment so that there are safe and can be retrieved when needed. Once this is done, pool the active files, depending on their nature, so that it can be shared across different users. 

The inactive files should be amassed and stored on a variable cost storage hierarchy. CIOs and solution providers also have to provision for software to migrate this data, keeping in mind that during this transition, none of the active applications are affected. 

Care should also be taken that while migrating archived data, it should be saved on different types of media, as defined by the policies. For instance, inactive files, which have been in existence for over three years, can be saved on a tape drive, thereby freeing up the physical storage space on the server.

And last, but not least, make sure that you create a well-defined storage virtualization policy for your customers, keeping in mind the data they have and how they wish to need it. After all, data is the newest currency in the business world and you would not want your customers to lose their valuable wealth, would you?

VINITA BHATIA