Storage virtualization
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.
Quick Pitch
With storage virtualization, 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 virtualization:
- Storage array virtualization - data is shared, virtualized and managed on a specific array of storage using the storage vendor's own virtualization and management software.
- SAN virtualization - the storage pool may comprise more than one array, possibly from multiple vendors, and the virtualization is implemented via third-party platform-independent technology embedded in the SAN fabric.