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