Storage Virtualisation

Huge year-on-year growth in data volumes, along with regulatory pressure to preserve and protect data within a tightening legal framework, is fuelling the need for more data storage capacity at an unprecedented rate.

IT managers are constantly balancing the risk of running out of storage with tightening budgets. Yet, typically, huge amounts of storage capacity lie idle across under-utilised servers and disparate storage arrays around the business.

To make matters worse, requirements fluctuate daily and not all data is the same. Some data is crucial to the business, much of it is unstructured, and a significant proportion should be discarded.

With storage virtualisation, storage capacity is removed from the individual user or server and is instead deployed in single or shared pools. Storage capacity is allocated to and accessed by the user or server via the network and can be adjusted to meet actual demand at any given time. Proactively managed by the IT team, disk space can be fully utilised without wastage. Capacity planning, data classification by importance, backup and restore and peak-time balancing all become easier.

There are two basic levels of storage virtualisation:

• Storage array virtualisation – data is shared, virtualised and managed on a    specific array of storage using the storage vendor’s own virtualisation and    management software.

• SAN virtualisation – the storage pool may comprise more than one array,    possibly from multiple vendors, and the virtualisation is implemented via
   third-party platform-independent technology embedded in the SAN fabric.

Key Storage Questions

•  How much of your IT budget goes on feeding the demand for storage across the    business? Do you know how much is really being spent, including power and    cooling?
•  Have you paid for storage capacity that you are not using? Is it a problem to    manage increasing demand for storage and ensure appropriate controls and    data protection are in place?
•  Are you planning to consolidate storage into more manageable pools?
•  Are you struggling to complete backups in time, especially at remote sites?
•  What level of control do you have over business data?
•  Are you confident that valuable information can be rapidly restored in the face of    disaster?
•  Do you understand how much you are spending on powering and cooling your    data storage infrastructure?
•  Can you find data easily across multiple storage devices? Is data unnecessarily    duplicated on different devices?
•  Can data created in one department be readily accessed by other authorised    users?

Storage Virtualisation Benefits