Everyone into the Pool

BUSINESS SOLUTIONS Everyone into the Pool Storage virtualization pools multiple storage devices into a virtual single storage resource, thereby reducing tedious administrative tasks. Over the last decade, as organizations have embraced far more sophisticated computing platforms and migrated online, the growth in data has been nothing short of phenomenal. Today, many companies find their storage needs growing by an annual rate of 50 percent to 100 percent and there s no end in sight. Organizations face growing challenges in storing and managing data effectively, observes Anil Desai, an independent consultant and author of The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management. It is one of the key IT issues the business world must confront. Amid a confusing tangle of storage systems, technologies and requirements, many organizations are now turning to storage virtualization. Keep in mind; the idea of creating centralized storage pools and sharing IT resources in not new. Storage area networks or SAN have been around for years. And they have even become commonplace within firms considered medium and large. Now for businesses wanting to go to the next level, storage virtualization is becoming the preferred technology. And vendors including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Overland Storage offer an increasingly sophisticated array of systems and solutions to manage tape, virtual tape, disk arrays, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and SANs. A New View There s a growing recognition that virtualization can boost efficiency, cut costs and ratchet up Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR). As a result, storage virtualization is growing at an annual rate of more than 100 percent. In fact, more than 80 percent of organizations now expect to use storage virtualization. This is according to a 2008 study conducted by F5 Networks which also stated that network-based file virtualization is a key technology for more effectively managing file-based information. While many organizations currently utilize 50 percent or less of their storage capacity, storage virtualization can push the figure to 90 percent or higher. Says Jeffrey Hill, senior research analyst at Aberdeen Group: Virtualization can drive significant improvements and enable a more efficient IT infrastructure. What makes virtualization, including storage virtualization, so appealing is the ability to create an abstraction layer between physical hardware and data. Using storage virtualization it is possible to centralize storage and manage it as a pool rather than as dozens or hundreds of different devices scattered across an enterprise. Essentially, it hides the differences that exist from system to system. This greatly simplifies management tasks. As Desai puts it: You then carve up that pool into portions of storage that are attached to the servers. Although virtualization can take many forms and all of them offer a variety of advantages storage virtualization is a bit different. For example, server virtualization consolidates various servers and applications on a single machine. On the other hand, storage virtualization uses multiple storage arrays including existing equipment. However, it offers a consolidated view that makes it appear there s a single system. What s more, it provides powerful tools for managing the environment more simply and effectively. It s like gluing diverse systems together and creating one big system, says Chris Saul, marketing manager for SAN Volume Controller at IBM. 1

A typical storage virtualization environment encompasses an array of systems and devices. By abstracting the physical location of the data and creating a logical space for data storage while mapping it between the physical and virtual worlds (through a mapping table) an enterprise greatly simplifies management tasks and system administration. Assortment of Systems A typical virtual storage environment includes an assortment of systems, including tape devices, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), NAS and SAN technology. It also involves a number of processes, techniques and strategies, including data deduplication, thin provisioning and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). These three tools can transform an IT storage environment. Data deduplication, for example, identifies and eliminates redundant data, thus reducing the demand for overall storage capacity as well as the network bandwidth and resources required to manage stored data. Unfortunately, Many organizations are awash in duplicate data and eliminating it can be time consuming and costly, says Desai. A virtual environment with a pool of storage makes it much easier to keep track of data and manage everything. Thin provisioning allows an organization to allocate a certain amount of a server space to storage, say 50 gigabytes of a 100-gigabyte physical machine. It also makes it possible for various applications and systems to tap into the pool as needed. This approach boosts utilization rates and helps an enterprise steer clear of server sprawl. It s an increasingly common feature in virtual storage systems sold by various manufacturers. It is now possible to integrate thin provisioning throughout an entire storage architecture, states Chris McCall, worldwide product marketing manager for HP StorageWorks. Meanwhile, HSM provides a way for an organization to automatically move data between high-cost and low-cost storage media. An HSM system monitors the way data is used and determines which data can safely be migrated to slower and less costly devices such as optical disk and tape and which data should stay on the fast devices, including disk arrays. Within a virtualized storage environment it s typically easier to manage various tiers of data and move old data to an archive using HSM. It s also easier to retrieve the same data. Virtualization is a particularly powerful tool in the DR arena. Disaster recovery systems, says Aberdeen Group s Hill, have traditionally required companies to duplicate the DR hardware and software infrastructure. That way it s possible to restore applications and data to the same environment from which it was backed up. Combining server and storage virtualization allows an organization to realize the advantages of both types of virtualization for an exponential gain. It s no small matter. The use of virtual machines in the backup process means that the virtual machine image, containing application and data, can be restored to any other machine that supports virtual machines, or even to bare metal computers with no operating system installed, Hill explains. This approach is valuable because the virtualization layer, or hypervisor, decides how to allocate physical resources to each virtual machine. As a result, IT has a consolidated view of storage along with a way to manage DR more effectively. Hill says that a business continuity and disaster recovery system that taps into virtualization offers quicker application recovery. And it drastically improves data recovery times. It enables lower cost computer hardware as a recovery system because the virtualization layer and not the hardware or operating system provides the recovery mechanism and the ability to replicate backup virtual machine images to remote sites over public networks. 2

A Different View Storage virtualization continues to advance in terms of both features and sophistication. Older and more costly Fibre-Channel systems are now giving way to iscsi-based SANs that use existing Ethernet while providing an advanced switching architecture capable of delivering a higher level of performance. What s more, newer storage virtualization systems allow organizations to make a transition to a virtual environment with minimal or no system downtime. In addition, It s possible to make non-disruptive changes as they are required, McCall says. No less important: newer storage virtualization tools and technologies are finally making tiered storage viable and cost effective. Traditionally, moving data to lower-performance and lower-cost devices and systems has proved vexing and disruptive due to various device, system and software incompatibilities. As a result, many organizations have veered away from a tiered storage model. However, products like the IBM SAN Volume Controller provide a way to manage a mélange of tools and systems within a single environment and within a more flexible IT infrastructure. The SAN Volume Controller provides a way to combine storage capacity from multiple disk systems into a reservoir of capacity that s easier to manage and serves as a single business resource rather than dozens or hundreds of separate boxes. It boosts storage utilization, offers a common interface for managing an array of heterogeneous systems and it supports improved application availability by insulating host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure. It also supports a tiered environment. This includes the ability to copy services from higher-cost to lowercost devices and across storage systems from multiple vendors. Organizations that use IBM s SAN Volume Controller often achieve a 30 percent or more improvement in utilization rates. What s more, a 20 percent decrease in overall storage capacity within an infrastructure isn t unusual, and administrators are usually able to double their productivity, Saul notes. The use of the technology can also improve provisioning and provide a more agile and flexible IT infrastructure. This is one that can adapt to changing systems, technologies and storage approaches. HP s Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) also provides a platform for tiering storage by creating embedded device-based virtualization. It creates a virtual storage node, including disk drives, cache, processors and controllers, using resources that already exist inside virtual servers. An organization can cluster these nodes together to transform an existing server storage capacity into a virtual storage system. It s then possible to manage a single iscsi SAN. The VSA solution offers thin provisioning, non-disruptive configuration setup, changes without remapping disks and volumes, and high availability of nodes. A multisite cluster and separate nodes can be presented to virtual machines as a single volume. Another leading-edge virtualization solution is HP StorageWorks SAN Storage Virtualization Services Platform (SVSP), which provides sophisticated tools for managing heterogeneous midrange storage arrays. The network-based storage platform pools capacity across HP and non-hp storage hardware. It works together with the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) as well as a number of third-party arrays to centralize the management of a virtualized SAN environment. HP s StorageWorks is said to reduce complexity, increase agility and boost efficiency. The product allows organizations using Fibre Channel SANs to simplify operations and improve overall productivity. Overland Storage also provides advanced solutions in the storage virtualization arena. Its Snap Server NAS devices and NEO E-Series tape systems are optimized for use with VMware virtualization software. 3

Both use Overland s Linux-based Guardian operating system. This allows them to function effectively within a virtual storage environment with a high degree of flexibility including the ability to accommodate unstructured data. What s more, says Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of marketing for overland, the products offer Enterprise Data Replication (EDR), which streamlines disaster recovery and speeds the redeployment of data. Beyond Back Up Kyle Fitze, director of product marketing for HP StorageWorks, says that storage virtualization creates enormous opportunities for organizations and it is ushering in a new era of IT flexibility. Virtualized storage systems eliminate the need to deal with ones and zeros; and bits and bytes. Because you re operating at a layer above, you re able to provision more effectively and think more strategically, he explains. Storage virtualization has transformed the way many organizations approach storage issues and disaster recovery. Aberdeen Group s Hill notes that vendors increasingly offer package solutions that combine storage technology with virtualization. In some cases, as with disaster recovery, this creates a plug and play IT solution that requires little system or administrative expertise. In fact, many vendors in the storage virtualization space now bundle the hypervisor with their products and sell the software for managing machines and DR as a value-added item. The market is changing and evolving rapidly, he says. Combining storage virtualization and disaster recovery makes sense. And it helps maximize IT dollars and ROI, Desai says. There is a synergy that results from using both technologies together, he adds. For example, it is possible to pick up and move encapsulated hard disks and storage systems without worrying about dependencies and file paths. You re not going to break the configuration that s required for business continuity or disaster recovery in a virtualized environment, Desai explains. That makes it easier to migrate data from local storage to SANs without reconfiguring database applications and other services. What s more, with shared storage, an organization has the ability to use automatic failover and live migration between host systems. It s something that simply isn t possible with locally attached storage, Desai points out. Finally, and perhaps most important, storage virtualization streamlines mirroring, boosts availability, and enhances recovery times for data and individual applications. In many cases, the recovery process can take minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. To be sure, storage virtualization, particularly when used with DR, is a winning proposition. The way Desai sees it, storage virtualization is a tool that organizations cannot afford to overlook. It s already a viable option with real ROI and it is continuing to improve, he adds. Storage virtualization offers numerous benefits for IT and the entire enterprise. The Benefits of Storage Virtualization In a survey conducted by the Enterprise Storage Group (ESG) in October 2005, users were asked to quantify the benefits of virtualization. According to this study, the benefits of storage virtualization include: 4

Improves device utilization levels Reduces storage management complexity and overall costs Facilitates interoperability and more open storage systems Enables resource consolidation Enables applications to more fully leverage virtualized storage, thanks to the tight integration of operating systems and virtualization technology Your CDW account manager and storage specialist can help deliver a storage virtualization environment that s right for your firm. CALL your account manager or 800.800.4CDW to talk to a specialist today. 090617 5