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Atul Sood
The data storage industry is one of the most dynamic sectors in information technology today. Storage technology has undergone rapid transformation as one innovation after another has pushed storage solutions forward. At the same time, the viability of new storage technologies is repeatedly affirmed by the rapid adoption of networked storage by virtually every large enterprise and institution. Businesses, governments, and institutions today depend on information, and information in its unrefined form as data ultimately resides somewhere on storage media. Applying new technologies to safeguard this essential data, facilitate its access, and simplify its management has readily understandable value.
Since the early 1990s, storage innovation has produced a steady stream of new technology solutions, including fibre channel, network-attached storage (NAS), server clustering, serverless backup, high-availability dual-pathing, point-in-time data copy (snapshots), shared tape access, storage over distance, iSCSI, CIM (common information model)-based management of storage assets and transports, and now, storage virtualization. Each of these successive waves of technical advance has been accompanied by disruption to previous practices, vendor contention, over-hyping of what the new solution could actually do, and confusion among customers. However, each step in technical development eventually settles on some useful application, and all the marketing dust finally settles back into place.
Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization is the logical abstraction of physical storage systems and thus, when well implemented, hides the complexity of physical storage devices and their specific requirements from management view. It is the amalgamation of multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage unit. Storage virtualization is often used in SAN (storage area network), a high-speed sub-network of shared storage devices, and makes tasks such as archiving, back-up, and recovery easier and faster and has tremendous potential for simplifying storage administration and reducing costs for managing diverse storage assets. According to IDC, virtualization includes the capability of connecting servers to logical volumes that are flexibly connected to actual physical volumes. Virtualization helps reallocate a heterogeneous collection of storage resources without concern for low-level details like block size and automate storage management functions.
The benefits associated with virtualized storage are due to two improvements in storage management. First, management tasks are simplified and streamlined by underlying software automation, which enables fewer storage managers to oversee larger pools of storage. Secondly, storage resources can be better utilized due to improved management. Without virtualization and pooling, storage managers over-provision storage resources to make sure that they were sufficient. Virtualized storage enables better utilization of total resources and eases the task of migrating data among different storage assets in a multi-tiered storage system. These benefits contribute to a reduced total cost of ownership. Put simply, the economic drivers are fairly straightforward: reduce costs without sacrificing data integrity or performance.
The amount of data companies store is skyrocketing. The growth of unformatted data is fast, email being a prototypical example. Businesses, however, cannot increase their numbers of administrators in proportion to the amount of data. This creates a need to change to an architecture that makes it possible to increase the amount of data managed per operations technician. As factors such as these prompt changes to the storage environment, there are a growing number of situations where building a SAN alone is not sufficient in terms of efficiency and system flexibility, and a virtualized solution is needed. Virtualized storage addresses typical enterprise concerns in the face of growing business challenges like manageability, scalability and availability--- reduces downtime due to failures or configuration changes.
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