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Storage Virtualization today, tomorrow and in the cloud


By Pierre Sabloniere, Technical Chair, SNIA Europe’s French Country Committee


W


ith cloud in perspective, it is time to revisit


foundations of storage infrastructures for the first part of our 21st century. Server virtualization is no longer a matter of early adopter risk taking. Since 2010, according to IDC, today, the number of new operating system images provisioned for application usage exceeds the number of non-virtualized ones and storage virtualization is on most clients’ agenda. This paper explores the emerging dual path of virtualization adoption ‘in the box’ versus ‘in the infrastructure’ and elaborates on how these operational models fulfill client’s expectations and future cloud solution needs.


Let’s start with client expectations from storage virtualization and consider an IDC user survey dated early 2009 regrouping 500+ answers. Drivers for virtualization adoption were classified along 4 desires; we could say their ‘wish list and almost all were equally weighted by the surveyed population.


Items 1 and 2 clearly reflected an IT operations point of view where manpower effort and change complexity could be perceived as strong pain points. On the other hand, numbers 3 and 4 seem to reflect more of a CFO point of view and to some extent, collide with IT operations views - less hardware capacity and more heterogeneity bring increased complexity to the IT operations plate already pretty full with their day–to-day tasks.


Purchasing organizations were not specifically consulted in this survey even though they applaud today’s x86 virtualisation, which brings x86 server commoditization and increases their purchasing power. Based on this, let’s add this 5th requirement to the initial 4 ones stated above: Increasing purchasing power for storage capacity


In addition to these user aspirations, there seems to be a competition between smart arrays and smart infrastructures. Most major vendors are proposing ‘appliance based’ storage virtualization products. These appliances propose a model of horizontal virtualization in the infrastructure federating disk arrays as capacity resources for their storage pools.


1 Reduction of time and complexity of moving data from one system to another


2 Reduction of the burden associated with storage moves, adds and changes


3 Implementing tier storage strategy based on heterogeneous storage systems


4 Boosting system utilization levels for storage October/November 2011 I www.snseurope.info 15


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