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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: After rapid development in the past half-decade, virtualization has swept the global IT industry to become a mainstream technology that is being adopted by a majority of users.
Adoption of Server Virtualization
Thanks to the continuous development of this technology, the IT industry has now moved from applying virtualization in basic, low-risk applications to deploying a large-scale, robust virtualized infrastructure for Tier-1, mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, and SAP.
With accelerated server virtualization, the objectives are to maximize business benefits by adopting virtualization in both operations and management, thus creating new efficiencies and cost-savings in both capex and opex. Is it true that simply increasing server virtualization can enable a business to attain these goals? The truth is that server virtualization only offers real benefits when complemented with the right IT infrastructure, especially the storage platform.
Why the Right Storage Infrastructure is Key
Organizations now deploy more and more virtual machines to operate their Tier-1, mission-critical applications. Without proper planning, however, this could result in virtual machine sprawl, inefficient scaling and rapidly-increasing storage complexity that plague data centers and undermine business results.
The key to succeed in server virtualization is the ability to tackle increasing workloads from virtual machines and ensure mission-critical systems are able to run with the highest levels of reliability and scalability. That can only be achieved by implementing a robust and dynamic storage infrastructure, because only the right storage infrastructure can continuously provide scalable capacity, power and manageability to accept and manage ever-increasing workloads.
In fact, it has been proven that the right storage infrastructure enables server virtualization to achieve a penetration rate of more than 30 per cent in a data centre.
Five Elements of the Right Storage Infrastructure
According to numerous customer cases and an industry study, the right storage infrastructure must include five core elements: data provisioning efficiency, storage tiering flexibility, scaling dynamism to multiple dimensions, the ability to support virtualization in a heterogeneous environment and 100 per cent reliability.
Data provisioning — enables on-demand resources to flexibly and effectively improve application performance and capacity utilization.
Storage tiering — simplifies storage administration across multiple internal and external storage frames, ensuring predictable performance for different storage tiers through the economical placement of data.
Scaling architecture — empowers multi-faceted scalability that allows storage capacity to expand without boundaries so that it can easily adapt to changes in the virtual server environment, dramatically improving time to market, manageability and cost-savings.
Storage virtualization for multi-vendor platforms — the capability of the storage infrastructure to support third-party solutions, enabling it to extend virtualization to them and existing disk arrays. This is important to maximize your ROI in heterogeneous environments and prolong the useful life of existing assets.
100 per cent reliability — although storage vendors can seldom guarantee 100 per cent data availability, this is obviously a crucial factor in the smooth operation of Tier-1 applications.
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The 'Co-evolution' of Storage and Virtualization
Virtualization is undoubtedly a core element of IT infrastructure whether it is for cloud or traditional deployments. Looking ahead, the number of virtual machines hosting mission-critical or cloud applications will continuously increase and rapidly generate a ripple effect that will impact every aspect of data center operations.
To keep pace with this evolution, server virtualization vendors are continuing to develop new features and solutions that enhance the performance and efficiency of virtual machines.
However, server virtualization is a game-changing technology–a technology that is constantly evolving to meet the non-stop growth of data and applications and release them from the limitations of a physical infrastructure.
The only way to truly move beyond these limitations is to focus on the co-evolution of the associated storage infrastructure.
Protect your Investment by Choosing the Right Storage Platform
To protect your investment and remove the risks of virtualizing mission-critical applications in the second wave of server virtualization, you need to partner with a trustworthy, forward-looking storage vendor that is constantly evolving its technologies with leading server virtualization platforms.
World-leading storage vendors can provide storage virtualization products which offer functionalities and performance to help you meet the challenges. By depending on proven storage technology, you can effectively assure the reliability, availability and performance of all your virtualized mission-critical applications.
By being better prepared for the greater consolidation needs of virtual machines in future server virtualization waves, you can take action today to fundamentally protect your existing investment and reduce future capital and operating costs.
The author is VP & GM at HDS India.
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