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Year 2006 will soon be behind us, and a challenging new year approaches. Bellwethers indicate a fast growth in storage with faster growth in areas involved with data protection. Vendors have been trying to battle it out to gain total supremacy for years. IT managers realized long ago that its RoI on storage technologies is important, but vendors have not. But, still vendors keep on inventing the storage wheel.

Virtualization Path
Nonetheless, many vendors frankly admit that storage is oversubscribed and underutilized. More budget is spent on maintaining the old because it becomes too disruptive to migrate. Also, multivendor storage keeps price competitive but adds to management costs. Cost has become crucial and it should be better spent on technologies that can give RoI.

Undoubtedly, it is cheaper to buy storage today rather than hire people to manage it. Today, CIOs don't want to give up what they already have. They want additional capabilities to be added to the existing technologies, which is much cheaper than migrating to a completely new concept, which they are not sure on RoI. Storage virtualization is one such concept.

It isn't a new concept, but it's getting a lot of attention lately as top storage vendors launch next-generation virtualization wares. The vendors vary on their approaches; some put virtualization in the network, while others put it at the edge or in the array. But, they all attack the same basic problem-simplifying storage management. All leading vendors, with their storage virtualization concepts have been able to convince IT managers that there is more to tape and disc storage.

Virtualizing storage has different methods. These methods are characterized by whether the virtualization is done on the host, the storage array or the SAN.

There are vendors who offer controller-based virtualization with their platforms. This technique puts virtualization in the storage controller, either as a separate appliance or built into the array. Since controller-based virtualization is intimately connected to the storage arrays, controller-based products generally do an excellent job of working with the storage, especially in the event of errors or write failures.

The major drawback to controller-based virtualization is vendor lock-in. In fact, in most cases, customers are not just locked into a vendor, they are locked into a particular product line since storage controllers only work with one product line. Another disadvantage is that controllers, by nature, have the narrowest view of the SAN-essentially, they only see the storage array.

The Gameplan
Most storage vendors are slowly changing their gears with their virtualization offerings and have started focusing on SMB market as well. Now even the smallest companies can enjoy the benefits of virtualization by optimizing the performance of their most pressing business applications-such as Microsoft Exchange or Oracle Financials-utilizing the logical partitioning capabilities of the integrated new fleet of midrange offerings of most storage vendors.

The challenge in front of most vendors is to deliver world-class enterprise service to their SMB customers with limited resources. Conventional midrange storage leaves much of this market under-served. However, many have addressed this issue with the cost-effective network storage controller, delivering high-end function in a user-friendly form factor.

As organizations look to move beyond tape-currently the predominant storage medium for long-term retention-utilizing disk storage technology for backup and recovery operations has become an attractive method of improving reliability, reducing backup windows, achieving greater data throughput performance and ensuring rapid recovery. Until now, however, the migration to current disk-based solutions has been causing disruption and costly downtime in legacy IT systems. Now many vendors have virtual tape library solutions that require no changes to existing backup policies, practices, or procedures.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in

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