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. In this case, data replication or another method of storage virtualisation can be considered.

Multiple Arrays, Multiple Vendors, Multiple Servers
As organisations scale and need to extend virtualisation across multiple servers, VERITAS provides network-based storage virtualisation solutions that work in conjunction with our host-based solutions to deliver virtualisation across hosts, across arrays, and across vendors. VERITAS Software's ServPoint line of software delivers such network virtualisation capabilities. VERITAS Powered™, a program through which partners embed VERITAS software in their network devices, furthers the extension of storage virtualisation to the network.

Getting the Full Value of Virtualisation
There are many scenarios for implementing storage virtualisation, and they are all beneficial. However, storage virtualisation delivers its full value only when it supports a high-performance storage infrastructure that is less costly, as well as more manageable, flexible, safe, and accessible.

VERITAS provides customers with highly scalable host-based virtualisation solutions, with the ability to scale the virtualisation into the network as the needs of the enterprise grow. The key issue for IT organisations remains how to ensure today's business needs will be met, while maintaining an ability to adapt to the future requirements that growth and changes in technology will present. That is the cost-containing flexibility VERITAS storage virtualisation solutions deliver.

VERITAS Storage Virtualisation Solutions
VERITAS tests storage virtualisation solutions in a variety of infrastructures through its integration lab to verify that VERITAS software meets quality and reliability requirements for use with a variety of vendors' equipment, platforms, and software.

With VERITAS, you can start small, with one host with direct-attached storage, and eventually extend storage virtualisation to the enterprise by using a SAN or networked storage environment. VERITAS' experience as a proven storage industry leader has equipped it to deliver the innovative technology that can make the best use of all storage resources for any enterprise.

Learn More About the VERITAS Storage Virtualisation Portfolio

VERITAS Volume Manager™ is an easy-to-use, online storage management tool for heterogeneous enterprise environments. It enables mirroring and striping across multiple disks from various vendors to eliminate physical storage limitations.

VERITAS SANPoint Foundation Suite™ uses the combined power of VERITAS File System™, VERITAS Volume Manager, and VERITAS clustering technologies so that multiple servers can access shared storage and files concurrently without affecting application performance.

VERITAS SANPoint Control™ allows you to manage storage virtualisation services across all SAN storage and server platforms. You also get storage resource management capabilities such as hardware discovery, visualisation, reporting, event handling, policy management, and a central administration point for your storage network.

VERITAS ServPoint™ enables consolidation of heterogeneous storage under a storage virtualisation engine for NAS and SAN. ServPoint SAN dynamically consolidates and allocates a pool of heterogeneous storage to database and application servers, while ServPoint NAS provides centralised file sharing among Windows and UNIX client systems from a heterogeneous storage pool.

Storage virtualisation will help organisations save on purchasing expensive disk storage when they already have an abundant supply. Through better utilisation of storage resources, IT staff will not be blind-sided by new requests for storage. Instead, organisations will be able to proactively manage their storage purchasing decisions. At the same time management of growing data stores can be centrally managed, saving time and labour costs.

Designed to simplify storage management, efficiently utilise resources, achieve optimal performance, and protect IT investment through flexibility of choice, VERITAS' market-leading storage virtualisation solutions can help organisations adapt to changing business requirements.

To ensure interoperability of an orgainsation's chosen solution, VERITAS interoperability Lab verifies that VERITAS software meets requirements for quality and reliability when used with a variety of different vendors' equipment, platforms, and software. With more than 86 percent of the Fortune 500 relying on VERITAS proven, open solutions you can be assured that your data is not only easily manageable, but always accessible.