Storage Virtualization: Gaining Momentum

Relatively speaking, storage virtualization is a simple concept. All you have to do is to take a bunch of networked storage devices and turn them into one big storage device that can be managed from one central control tower. Subsequently, heterogeneous storage environments are easier to manage, administrative tasks can be streamlined, data can be migrated quickly, and there is more efficient use of disk space, among other benefits. 

These features help to explain its popularity. As with anything promising simplicity and lower capital expense, there is a growing interest in storage virtualization. Virtualization has always been seen as one of the most important trends. In fact, Gartner predicts that virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010. According to another report by Springboard Research, the virtualization software and services market in the Asia-Pacific is estimated to reach $1.35 billion with CAGR of 42 per cent by 2010. Virtualization services is estimated to touch $1 billion by 2010 and will form the major portion of this market as organizations will spend two to three times more on services than on software. 

There are a number of reasons for the popularity of Storage Virtualization. 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,” says Hitachi Data Systems. 

Virtualization offers significant business and IT advantages over traditional approaches to storage. Storage virtualization can help organizations to: 
• Reduce data center complexity and improve IT productivity by managing multiple physical resources as fewer virtual resources 
• Flexibly meet rapidly changing demands by dynamically adjusting storage resources across the information infrastructure
• Reduce capital and real estate costs by creating virtual resources instead of adding more physical devices 
• Improve utilization of storage resources by sharing available capacity and deploying storage on demand only as it is needed 
• Deploy tiers of different storage types to help optimize storage capability while controlling cost and power and cooling requirements

“We see storage consolidation as the current trend in today’s market and we are beginning to see companies deploy multiple discrete storage solutions because of the growth in the past few years. This trend leads to the requirement of consolidation, either physical or logical,” says Mukul Mathur, Director – Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia. “Power scarcity will be part of the storage landscape for the foreseeable future, according to IDC by 2008 and the budget allocated for keeping the datacenters cool will exceed the investments made for servers and storage. Although storage products are not the worst offenders of this cause, it is still an important contributor and the answer to this is storage virtualization.” 

Storage virtualization delivers better information and application availability in several ways. It makes it possible to move data without disrupting operations, since it helps eliminate the downtime frequently caused by data movement in non-virtualized environments. For organizations planning to use tiered storage to control costs, virtualization makes deployment easier by enabling data to move between tiers without disruption while also providing common management capabilities for all tiers. When storage is virtualized, access to information does not require knowledge of the physical location of the information. Virtualization separates the logical view of information from its physical location, enabling administrators to focus on information itself and how it can be used, rather than where information is stored. And because changes can be made to the virtual infrastructure so much more quickly and easily than to the physical infrastructure, IT organizations can respond faster to changes in business requirements that affect storage. 

“Virtualization has been one of the most important trends in the IT industry for quite some time now. A virtualized environment with advanced management tools helps reduce complexity of storage environment. The right kind of virtual environment tools provide a unified way to manage backup/recovery and replication. Virtualization is fundamental in enabling business continuity and a storage virtualization solution eases the task and cost of storage capacity planning,” says Anand Naik, Director – Systems Engineering, Symantec Corporation. In short, virtualization is the hottest technology to make a serious impact in the market. Storage virtualization has been catching on due to the following benefits it offers: 
• Automation 
Many tasks that may be time consuming can be automated with the help of storage virtualization. Policy-driven virtualization tools obviate the need for people to address each alert or interrupt in the storage business. This, in itself, can have many implications. For instance, it can save cost by reducing the number of IT personnel required.

• Efficient Storage Management
Earlier, multiple storage devices scattered over a network had to be managed independently. But with the advent of storage virtualization, a single storage entity can be managed from a central console. 

• Much Better Resource Utilization 
Pooling and non-disruptive data migration can dramatically improve capacity utilization. It is estimated that storage virtualization can help improve the utilization of available resources by almost up to 50%. This is due to the fact that when all the available storage is pooled, there will be no need to search for free space on disks. Also, space can be allocated as and when needed without the need for estimating how much a given host would require in the future. 

• Non-Disruptive Data Migration 
One key benefit of storage virtualization is the ability to migrate data while maintaining concurrent I/O access. Hence, data migration does not cause any inconvenience or disturbance to other processes that are happening at the same time.

• Disaster Recovery 
Virtualization can duplicate important servers and hence this obviates the need to maintain physical duplicates of every piece of hardware as a precautionary measure in case of any disasters. 

• Cost Savings 
Automation can save cost by reducing the number of IT personnel required. The utilization of available resources by almost up to 50% is a quick way to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). The virtualization engine can use its access pattern information and leverage its online migration features to transparently relocate frequently accessed data to more expensive, high-performance storage and move less frequently accessed data to less expensive storage, bringing true ILM within reach and thus resulting in a cost-efficient storage mechanism 

• Energy Savings 
Storage virtualization enables organizations to more effectively manage storage as well as increase storage utilization, resulting in significant capacity and cost savings while also addressing critical data center energy issues. Thus, storage virtualization supports the Green IT Revolution that is gaining momentum today.

If you have got a favourite storage brand, chances are that it has a virtualization solution. This includes both big server vendors and storage leaders. The storage leader EMC offers a range of block- and file-virtualization products, including Invista, which virtualizes SANs using a split-path approach, and virtualization consulting services. 

“EMC Invista is our product in this range that brings networked storage virtualization intelligence to your existing storage area network (SAN) infrastructure. Invista’s latest version V2.1 demonstrates that it is a proven and technologically sound offering for business production environments,” says Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director – Partners & Alliances, EMC India. “New developments in Invista’s architecture, availability, scalability, upgradability, and protection capabilities are enabling users to have more choice in deploying flexible network-based storage virtualization infrastructures,” adds Viswanath Ramaswamy. 

EMC Rainfinity is the safest, most scalable, standards-based solution for file virtualization. Rainfinity products help address some of the biggest problems associated with growth – storage system migration, load balancing and planned outages. It provides a solution that enables organizations to dramatically decrease time and costs associated with file and file system management.

EMC Invista can be used with VMware ESX Server 3.0.2, which is our server virtualization software, thus enabling organizations to improve their ability to manage, share, and protect the growing amount of information that is being supported by VMware Infrastructure environments. Hitachi Data Systems integrates virtualization into its enterprise disk arrays. 

“As a cornerstone of a strategic initiative to enhance the disaster recovery benefits for VMware customers around the globe, Hitachi Data Systems has announced compatibility with VMware Site Recovery Manager, supporting heterogeneous virtualized storage,” says Vivekanand Venugopal, VP, Solutions & Products Group, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems. As the adoption of server virtualization continues to accelerate, organizations are looking to reduce the risk, cost and complexities associated with applying traditional disaster recovery methods to virtualized workloads, and maximize the safeguard of application data stored on sprawled virtual machines across the datacenter. To address these pressing customer challenges, the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter facilitates the linkage between Hitachi’s market-leading array-based replication technologies, including Hitachi Universal Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy Synchronous, and Hitachi ShadowImage in-system replication software, and VMware Site Recovery Manager. Coupled together, these software solutions provide industry-leading operational resilience, robust data protection, recovery management and replication capabilities optimized for VMware infrastructure. 

Hitachi Data Systems has recently released Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2000 Series, which breaks new ground in operational efficiency, and introducing a wide range of pioneering technologies, previously unavailable on a midrange storage platform, that deliver improved performance, connectivity, scalability, reliability and ease-of-use to midrange customers, and demonstrate Hitachi’s rich heritage of world-class storage innovation. Customers benefit by implementing a sophisticated, cost-effective midrange storage platform that can scale to better address their growing storage environments and diverse application requirements. 

The Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers up to 4x, the performance compared to prior generations, and also offers storage consolidation for iSCSI, NAS, and Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) connections. The AMS Series 2000 is comprised of three models: the Hitachi AMS 2100, the Hitachi AMS 2300, and the Hitachi AMS 2500. The entire portfolio of midrange storage systems meets the benchmarking standard "Five 9's" of availability, 99.999 per cent uptime. The new Hitachi AMS Series 2000 delivers the following technology breakthroughs: IBM storage virtualization offerings are all designed to operate with server virtualization systems such as VMware to help organizations enjoy the benefits of operating a fully virtualized information infrastructure.

IBM offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for storage virtualization. To meet the broadest range of storage requirements, IBM’s family of offerings for storage virtualization includes solutions for both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) approaches to shared data storage. 

File virtualization: 
In NAS environments, file virtualization using IBM Scale-out File Services aids in data sharing by presenting a single namespace (directory/folder structure) for files, which remains constant regardless of their physical location. This ability not only helps make it easier to share files among servers, it also facilitates implementation of tiered storage at the file level. 

NAS has traditionally been considered unsuitable for large storage demands because of its inability to scale. But new scale-out NAS technology allows greater scalability through the use of virtualization. IBM Scale-out File Services utilize scaling architectures and technologies borrowed from server environments and apply them to the storage environment. The goal is to offer simplified access to data and the scalability to grow as dictated by the needs of individual users, applications, the IT department and the broader organization. 

File System Virtualization: 
The explosive growth of unstructured data and the associated proliferation of file servers and NAS appliances have resulted in acute management challenges for IT administrators – as well as deteriorating data access for clients (both users and application servers). IBM System Storage Nseries Virtual File Manager (VFM) software is a comprehensive solution for managing unstructured file data. Rather than virtualizing files the way Scale-out FileServices does, VFM virtualizes file systems in existing NAS appliances. It is designed to provide simplified and consistent data access, even when the underlying storage infrastructure changes. VFM creates a global namespace that aggregates distributed files located on IBM Nseries storage systems to present a single logical pool of storage. This helps enable IT organizations to more quickly and easily change, add, migrate or consolidate storage while avoiding impact to end-users.

Tape Storage Virtualization: 
The IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 and IBM Virtualization Engine TS7500 are virtual tape solutions for mainframe and open systems servers, respectively, that are designed to optimize tape processing. Through the implementation of a fully integrated tiered storage hierarchy of disk and tape, the benefits of both technologies can be leveraged to help enhance performance and provide the capacity needed for today’s backup and tape processing requirements. Deploying these innovative virtual tape systems can help provide increased level of operational simplicity and energy efficiency, support a low cost of ownership, and increase reliability to provide significant operational efficiencies. 

Disk Storage Virtualization: 
For organizations using a SAN approach to storage, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller combines storage capacity from multiple physical systems into a virtual reservoir of storage that can be managed from a central point. As a result, storage administration is simplified, and organizations can treat storage as a resource to address business requirements without being concerned with its physical implementation. It also insulates host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure, which can improve application availability. Finally, SVC helps enable tiered storage environments in which the type and cost of storage are aligned with the value of the data. When combined with SVC’s ability to help improve storage utilization and control growth, tiered storage with SVC also helps reduce energy requirements. 

Storage Infrastructure Management: 
The IBMTotalStorage Productivity Center suite of storage infrastructure management tools can help reduce the complexity of managing storage environments by centralizing, simplifying and automating storage tasks associated with storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management. IBMTotalStorage Productivity Center can help manage the capacity utilization of storage systems, file systems and databases and automate file-system capacity provisioning, perform device configuration and management of multiple devices from a single user interface, tune and proactively manage the performance of storage devices on the Storage Area Network (SAN), as well as manage, monitor and control the SAN fabric. 

From a technology perspective, organizations will need to employ ever-more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the additional information that is being generated every day. IDC’s study reveals a fifty-fold increase in the corporate data over the last three years and indicates an increase of six-fold annually over the next three years, bringing the total content count to 988 exabytes by 2010, while there will only be about 600 exabytes of capacity on storage systems.

Bottom line 
As the inexorable march toward virtualized everything continues, storage virtualization products and choices will keep growing. Because of the different architectural and topological approaches to storage virtualization, finding the right virtualization solution can be complicated. The easiest approach is to buy everything from one vendor – if you are a Company X shop full of Company X gear, buy Company X’s virtualization product. However, that does not work for most companies. The potential rewards (and, increasingly, mandates) of spending less time and money on storage infrastructure and management make it an important decision.

The drivers of storage virtualization and storage management in India are data explosion, cost of managing data, better utilization and understanding of data and automation. It helps in simplifying IT operations and, on the other hand, it increases complexity because of the ease with which it helps create virtual environment. The future of virtualization lies in unified management with integration of discovery, reporting, storage virtualization, and data center automation. Today, virtualization is at the top “must-have” list for the CIOs as they seek to stem a seemingly endless flow of challenges including: 
• Uncontrolled growth
• Sprawling servers and storage 
• Underutilized IT assets 
• Insufficient power availability
• Skyrocketing costs
• Low RoI 
• Excessive downtime
• Inflexible infrastructures 
• Immobile data 

Last year, there has been a big change in this industry with partners and customers actively seeking complimentary solutions to extend the virtual infrastructure across the enterprise from desktop to server to storage. This move to total enterprise virtualization is the biggest change that has happened in the past two years and is the future of storage virtualization. 

Virtualization will become even more mainstream over the next 18 months as data centers recognize the obvious benefits of all types of virtualization. However, the functionality features of virtualization will continue to advance and attract ever more widespread usage. 

Virtualization is here to stay. Storage virtualization is part of larger storage industry trends and innovations. It simplifies complex storage environments and makes better use of other storage options, including lower-cost modular storage. Virtualization is instrumental in reducing the CAPEX, total cost of ownership, and extends the life of legacy assets and successfully meets predefined QoS parameters on a per application basis. It also enables heterogeneous, any-to-any replication – using one set of tools and a common process. “Virtualization empowers significant increases in storage capacity utilization and allows one administrator to manage from three to 10 times more storage capacity. We will continue to be the leaders of Storage Virtualization technology,” says Vivekanand Venugopal.