Delivering the full value of storage virtualisation (page 1 of 2)

According to Gartner, a research and advisory firm, every dollar spent on that new storage requires five dollars of additional IT resources to manage it. Typically, half of all IT budgets are spent on storage, while less than 50 percent of existing storage capacity is actually in use.

Given these spiralling costs, increasingly complex environments, and accelerating amounts of data, storage virtualisation technology has come to the forefront. It presents multiple ways to contain costs through more efficient access, management, and use of existing storage resources.

The Benefits of Storage Virtualisation
Storage virtualisation presents multiple physical storage devices from various vendors as higher-level, logical devices that can be managed more easily and efficiently. This technology lays the groundwork for creating and managing large pools of storage instead of individually managing a multitude of multi-vendor devices. It opens the way for significant cost-effectiveness through improved storage utilisation, simplified and centralised storage management, and lower IT training costs. It also promises improved data access and more flexible storage allocation.

Despite all of this attention, storage virtualisation is not new. It was first conceived 20 years ago in mainframe computing. Host-based solutions such as VERITAS Volume Manager have been delivering cost-saving storage virtualisation benefits for more than 10 years. The emergence of storage area networks (SANs), however, has increased the focus on storage virtualisation technologies and has helped propel a greater understanding of the full value storage virtualisation can deliver.

Proven Leadership in Storage Virtualisation
The 2001 Storage Market Share Report from Gartner DataQuest documented VERITAS Software's 79.9 percent of the worldwide market share for volume management and virtualisation software, more than seven times the market share of its closest competitor.

VERITAS delivers the full value of storage virtualisation through an approach that is comprehensive, architecture-independent, and modular. This approach gives you the maximum freedom to contain costs as you construct the storage environment you need now, and as organisations continue to adapt to your developing business needs.

Storage-Based Solutions Provide Limited Scalability
Early storage virtualisation solutions were storage-based. This approach allows multiple servers to share the data in a large, single storage array. The limitations and potential costliness of array-based virtualisation become apparent as data grows and infrastructures become more complex. Servers cannot access data beyond the single array, and IT departments may become dependent upon vendor-specific solutions to overcome this problem.

VERITAS Solutions Scale to Many Arrays, Many Vendors
By contrast, host-based solutions, such as VERITAS Volume Manager, permit disks within multiple arrays and from multiple vendors to be presented as a virtual pool to a single host server. This gives IT staff the flexibility of storage-vendor independence, while still delivering the benefits of centralised storage administration from a single console.

Although the data is only available through a single server, that server can be made highly available to ensure data access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The potential disadvantage with this solution arises when multiple servers require shared access to the same data.