Storage : Consolidating virtually

INDIA: Virtualization and consolidation are inter-related technologies related to the two pillars of simplification paradigm, that is if you are looking at simplifying information technology. While consolidation is more of a physical aspect of simplification, virtualization deals with the logical aspect of simplification.

Put simply, virtualization is the process of aggregating smaller resources (compute, storage and networks) to derive the cumulative power of all resources. Alternately, virtualization can also be used to carve out smaller resources from one large resource. The objective is to drive higher utilization of resources or add horizontal scalability in the environment, says Surajit Sen, director, channels, alliance & market, NetApp India.

Subram Natarajan, solution architect, IBM India/South Asia defines virtualization more simply as having multiple storage devices. It makes sense to leave them as they are, and then logically represent them in a single storage device.

The concept of virtualization started many years ago on the servers. Server virtualization is all about changing the old computing paradigm of one application per server, breaking the rigidity between hardware and software providing an environment to run multiple OS instances and applications side by side on the same hardware. Server virtualization bundles the OS and a software application into a virtual machine that is typically hardware independent. This entire package of virtual hardware, OS and application is turned into a single software file, says Rajesh Itagi, director, client services, EMC, India and SAARC.

Storage virtualization is pooling of multiple physical storage resources into a single storage resource that is centrally managed. Storage virtualization automates tedious and time-consuming storage administration tasks enabling the storage administrator do tasks like backup, archiving, and recovery more easily and in less time, because the overall complexity of the storage infrastructure is disguised, says Vikas Kakkar, sr technologist and data management ambassador, Sun Microsystems. Storage virtualization is commonly used in file systems, storage area networks (SANs), switches and virtual tape systems. Users can implement storage virtualization with software, hybrid hardware or software appliances.

 

Adopting virtualization

With the mushrooming of new types of connectivity devices and mobility of users, there is the need to access information anytime and anywhere, resulting in the need for continuous data accessibility. Combined with explosive data growth, this creates a daunting challenge for IT organizations. Virtualizing where applications run and how data is stored has been a good first step in meeting the need to store, manage, manipulate, and distribute data across the enterprise more efficiently, says Ashis Guha, country manager, Brocade India.

Power management has also become one of the key enablers for adoption of virtualization in India. For a developing economy like India, there has been a rapid rise in consumption of energy resources and greenhouse gas emission. And with the global economy undergoing meltdown, for Indian enterprises it is critical to justify IT spending by more sophisticated metrics than cost per megabyte for storage.

Kakkar of Sun quotes IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall data center power consumption; Gartner predicts that by 2009, half of the worlds data centers will not have sufficient power to support their applications.

And with the cost of electricity surmounting every day, power is an important reason that businesses pursue virtualization. For every machine you dont run, you save power and money! Customers with a large number of smaller applications hosted in their data centers, namely verticals like IT services, development organizations, BFSI, etc, are adopting server virtualization. On the other hand, customers who have a large deployment of storage arrays, especially legacy and modular storage are considering the adoption of storage virtualization. This typically includes customers in the BFSI and IT services verticals.

Natarajan says that verticals like financial services and telecom are the front runners, which is not surprising because with data explosion companies operating in these sectors opt for virtualization.

Trends in India

Data explosion is a tremendous pressure on the limited storage infrastructure of enterprises. And since enterprises cannot afford to increase the number of data administrators at the same rate at which data is increasing; they are left with no option but to adopt a technology that can manage this data in an efficient manner. Therefore, the market potential of storage virtualization solutions in India is huge and expanding. Storage virtualization and storage management in India is being driven due to data explosion, cost of managing data, better usage and understanding of data and automation.

Itagi however begs to differ as he believes that even though adoption of storage virtualization and client devices is on an upswing, the current buzz is focused on server virtualization.

Adoption of storage virtualization will be among customers who have large number of legacy and modular storage which are currently hosting key applications, and that those storage systems cannot be replaced immediately. While server virtualization can be adopted at the initial stages of the application and data center deployments, storage virtualization would be considered typically when there is a large deployment of storage already in the data center.

Says Sen, Virtualization as a technology is being keenly investigated in all aspects of the data center. The first adoption of virtualization technologies was in test and development environments, followed by consolidation of lightweight servers like DNS, DHCP, AD, Webserves. Virtualization has made steady progress over the last one year and had proliferated applications like SAP, Exchange and SQL.

Consolidation advantages

Consolidation is all about pooling resources to enable greater utilization of assets with greater flexibility. Consolidation can be defined as an approach towards optimizing technologies to achieve cost savings, improve performance, and mitigate risks. This approach involves planning, optimization, and physical migration of systems and facilities. Consolidation is applied to data centers, servers, storage, applications, services and networks.

When people look at consolidation, they are looking at consolidating their applications and servers into fewer footprints. This could be because of power saving, moving from old technology to newer one. When moving to consolidated platform, they enhance production applications by complementing with more powerful storage architecture, says Natarajan.

With increasing pressure on Indian organizations to improve service levels, increase in availability, reduced costs, and better manageability of IT environment is the key. This can be achieved through data center consolidation. Consolidating the data of the company also reduces the need for multiple hardware boxes leveraging the option of doing Information Lifecycle Management in a single storage system thereby reducing data center footprint, power requirement, etc. This drives towards effective utilization of IT resources and cost reduction. All this and much more attracts companies in India towards the adoption of consolidation.

In order to keep up with rapidly changing market demands, customers have focused on day to day business and ignored the growth of individual servers and their dedicated storage. As these storage islands have expanded to more significant capacity levels, total storage utilization across the enterprise and the inability to share data between applications have become inhibitors to further growth.

Guha of Brocade says rapid changes in hardware, technology, and capacity demands are forcing enterprises to implement ongoing server and storage consolidation and data migration strategies to optimize available storage assets. Consolidation enables increased storage utilization by lowering allocation for headroom leading to decreased storage capital expenditures by enabling the purchase of storage on an as-needed basis. Moreover, administrative staff productivity is increased as they are able to manage more storage with fewer personnel. Application downtime is reduced and a centralized network environment for storage and server platforms is created.