This excerpt was written by by Benjamin F. Kuo, product marketing manager, Troika Networks, from the book Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management, by Tom Clark and courtesy of Addison-Wesley.
Future directions for virtualization: A foundation for the future
As with any technology, virtualization technology has gone through the usual hype
cycle—where it is first touted for technology's sake as the
"next great thing," then oversold by marketers and analysts, maligned by
the early adopters when it doesn't meet their expectations, and finally finding
its niche with customers who have ignored all the hype and found where
the technology really fits. It looks like virtualization has finally found its
niche, which is not as a standalone technology, but as an enabler to the next
level of storage applications.
Customers are now finding that the benefits that virtualization provides—
which include consolidation of resources, easier management of
infrastructure, and simplification and centralization of storage applications—
are being incorporated not only into standalone products, but integrated
into solutions across a wide spectrum. Software providers who
spearheaded the original push to add virtualization to storage area networks
have gone beyond promoting "virtualization" as a technology and
instead have learned that what customers really care about: solving their
pressing data storage needs. When it comes down to buying solutions, they
are less concerned about the whiz bang technology of "virtualization," and
more concerned about if those solutions can provide them with the ability
to protect and manage their data better. Whether a product helps them
manage their data center better through virtualization or any other technology,
when it comes down to the bottom line, customers are only concerned
about how well it helps them achieve their goals.
To a large part, you can see that companies have learned this lesson
well. Instead of selling "in-band" and "out-of-band" virtualization, companies
instead are pointing out how features such as snapshot, mirroring, and
replication (running on top of virtualization capabilities) help the process of
backing up and protecting data. Instead of debating philosophy on which
virtualization technique is the "right one," companies have realized that it's
the performance, features, and reliability of their solutions that determine if
customers will buy their products. Companies, of course, haven't given up
on using their particular technology mix as a differentiator, but the industry
has matured enough that companies understand that virtualization isn't
what brings customers to the table—it's the benefits that virtualization techniques
bring to features running on top of it.
If you review the marketing materials and websites of companies that
several years ago were on the virtualization bandwagon, instead of talk
about virtualization techniques, you see focus on disk utilization, reduced
backup times, better tolerance for planned and unplanned downtime, centralized
management, and better management of disk storage growth.
Where does this put virtualization in the future? Clearly, virtualization
technology is now becoming a mainstream, required function of nearly
every component in a storage area network. It's now becoming apparent
that virtualization functionality is also key to such emerging movements as
information lifecycle management. Information Lifecycle Management
(ILM), sometimes referred to as Data Lifecycle Management (DLM), strives
to allow customers to optimize their use of storage, mostly through both
policy and products that move data between different tiers of storage, depending
on the value of that data and its age. ILM is expected to help companies
manage their costs by putting less accessed and important data on
cheaper disk and tape, instead of keeping expensive primary enterprise storage
locked up with unimportant data. It's clear that one of the major enablers
of information lifecycle management is the ability to move data from
one storage device to another. Virtualization is a key way this can happen.
In fact, there are startup companies that are designing software that moves
data on a block-by-block level, making it possible to distribute difficult-tomanage
data such as databases across multiple tiers of storage. Virtualization
is a key enabler to making data portable enough to be moved readily in
the context of the emerging concept of ILM.
Virtualization is now expected to be included as a standard part of array, in the network as an appliance, or in an intelligent switch. Many storage
array controllers have moved to, or will soon move to some level of virtualization—
beyond the inherent virtualization they've always had in
aggregating individual disks into RAID sets and volumes—including the
ability to virtualize storage volumes across physically separate controllers.
Some storage array providers have even touted the ability to also create volumes
from competitive array providers—again, just another spin on basic
virtualization techniques. Even the Fibre Channel switching providers are in
the business of virtualization, with all of the major manufacturers saying
they will include basic virtualization capability in what they are calling "intelligent
switches." These intelligent switches will include either blades or
ports that support the basic capabilities of virtualization, and either integrated
as part of the switches or in tandem with third-party software, they
will essentially provide virtualization techniques as part of a fabric. Other
spins on virtualization show that it is becoming a basic functional add-on to
any storage network—with specialized hardware appliances giving the ability
to add virtualization to any storage network; specialized boards with acceleration
of virtualization functionality; and even chips and network
processors that give any hardware provider the ability to integrate storage
virtualization functionality into their network switches, storage arrays, or
servers.
All of this leads to one conclusion. Storage virtualization has now gone
from "hot new technology" to a required piece of the storage solution puzzle.
It's pretty clear that future products will simply adopt virtualization as a
required part of the storage picture, and the technology will continue to
play an important role in the future of storage.
This excerpt was written by by Benjamin F. Kuo, product marketing manager, Troika Networks, from the book Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management, by Tom Clark and courtesy of Addison-Wesley.
If you found this book excerpt helpful, purchase the book from Addison-Wesley.
