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Virtualization is not the holy grail that will take away all the infrastructure woes,' says Arun Gupta, director, P-GIS, BRM–SCANZ, Philips Electronics India. Is the market finally coming to grips with virtualization? 

Storage virtualization has been around for long and so has the confusion surrounding it-lack of standard measure, no industry agreement on the best approach and exaggerated marketing claims. And, embroiled and lost within these issues has been the true picture of what virtualization can do or cannot do. According to experts, virtualization is a concept and not a technology. Hence, there are bound to be disparate definitions, standards and approaches to it with vendors evolving their own versions of the concept.

Even as the market continues to abuzz with hype and misconceptions, storage virtualization is nevertheless a reality that can't be escaped. With a more thought out approach instead of plunging head on, storage virtualization could well address the growing deployment and management challenges associated with the sheer number and scale of current and future storage environments.

According to Radhakrishna Pillai, head, IT, Team SRL Ranbaxy, storage virtualization is promising, but it is still in an evolving stage. “CIOs need to take a cautious call on how and when it should be used in the enterprise. There is lot of hype about virtualization and vendors are trying their bit to differentiate their products from others,” he explains. All said and done, storage virtualization is no longer just a buzzword. The key is that CIOs need to have a total understanding of what virtualization can do and what it cannot do.

Confusion Still Prevails
According to PK Gupta, chairman, SNIA India, some of the areas where confusion still prevails in the market are no industry agreement on the best approach for  virtualization: e.g. at the host, in the SAN, or on the array; in band vs out of band; measuring the investment with RoI; whether the total cost of virtualized solution has a positive bottom line improvement. One of the key concern areas while deciding on storage virtualization is that it has no standard measure defined by a reputable organization such as INCITS (international committee for information technology standards) or IETF (internet engineering task force). SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), though, has produced useful content for vendors as well as customers.

The confusion is primarily a result of lack of awareness in the market. According to Ajaz Munsiff, director, Business Development, Virtualization Products, EMC, the confusion is still there as many organizations do not fully understand what virtualization is and why they need it. He further explains that there are instances wherein the pain areas can very well be solved by solutions other than virtualization but the latter is still pushed by the vendor and asked by the customer. “The blame for this falls on the vendors sometimes, propagating virtualization as the solution to all problems. The customers need to understand and ask themselves the question whether it is a fit in their organization and their IT set-up or not,” he adds.

Shailesh Agarwal, country manager, IBM Storage, IBM India, believes that the key to success is to clearly understand the business problem that virtualization will resolve, plan, and then implement the technology in a phased manner.

Vendors on the Hot Seat Questions that CIOs would like to get answers for: What is the TCO of the solution over 3-5 years? How much effort is required to manage the operations? How can I address scalability as my business requirements grow? What are the SPOF (single point of failure) issues, which I need to be aware of? How does this impact the deployment of my business continuity and disaster recovery objectives? What are the future developments in this space, which may leave the current solution obsolete in the next 12-18 months?

'Do I really need virtualization?' is therefore the first question that experts believe the CIO/IT Manager needs to ask himself/herself.

Do I Need it?
For the CIOs some key points to consider and questions to answer when evaluating adoption of virtualization include: what is the real IT issue they are facing and trying to solve, are there traditional solutions that can solve the problem, if not then is virtualization going to solve the problem, can they justify the investment, what about TCO over a period of time, how much disruption the virtualization solution will cause to the current environment, can they use their existing equipment (hardware, software, processes) in which they have invested heavily, when introducing new technology will it work, can it be supported with existing trained staff, does it fit into the overall operation (including DR)?

While there is no defined criterion that can be considered as a standard for deciding on virtualization, there are however some parameters which an organization can measure itself against to help in the decision making process. If the customer is feeling significant, demonstrable operational challenges, pain, or expense from managing approx 30-40 terabytes or more of multi-vendor storage (SANs), performing more than three data migrations (from lease rollovers, technology refreshes, etc.) per year, the customers feel the impact to service levels, with significant downtime each time they need to make changes to the equipment within their infrastructure, it can call for the need for storage virtualization. Other likely contenders for storage virtualization include organizations with provisioning capacity from multiple types of storage and experiencing pain and cost when administering heterogeneous storage environments, experiencing significant downtime related to storage-management events (performance moves, re-provisioning, etc.) and those with Information Lifecycle Management deployments (leading to data movement across tiers, copying or cloning data across from heterogeneous storage platforms, tiers, etc).

According to Akhilesh Tuteja, executive director, KPMG India, in scenarios where the storage requirements are large, storage demand is less predictable, storage requirements typically undergo periods of peaks and turfs and there are 3-4 different storage systems whether homogenous or heterogeneous, it makes sense to go for storage virtualization.

Munsiff explains that customers who simply want reduced storage costs or heterogeneous storage management or replication don't really need virtualization as traditional solutions can help achieve that. Customers with very high-availability requirements for non-disruptive movement of data to support lease rollovers, technology refreshes and data center migrations have the right business need for storage virtualization.

However, just identifying the pain points and matching them against the need for virtualization is not enough as it is also critical to see whether virtualization fits into the overall storage environment. For instance, most of the storage boxes today come with certain inherent proprietary features. Implementing virtualization may mask some of the existing functionalities and render some of the features redundant. Thereby, leading to losing some of the benefits of these features and functionalities. Therefore, studying the existing IT environment and storage infrastructure is critical.

According to Vivekanand Venugopal, director, Software, Solutions, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems, before plunging down the virtualization route, organizations need to understand their current environments and ascertain candidates for consolidation and virtualization. “Organizations also need to understand data management and its business alignment. Are there resource utilization issues, downtime issues, provisioning issues, is there a common migration and replication requirement, are some of the questions that they will need to ask themselves,” he adds.

What's Hot, What's Not
Selecting the right virtualization technology/approach is one of the biggest challenges in the way of adoption of virtualization. 

While there is no standard, the classification can be broadly done on the basis of what is virtualized, where it is virtualized and how it is virtualized. Depending on what is virtualized, the approaches can be categorized under virtualizing the device, block, file system, disk level, tape, etc. Depending on how it is virtualized, there can be 'In-band' and 'Out of band' virtualization approaches. Depending on where it is virtualized, there can be host based, disk array and switch level virtualization. Typically, the virtualization approach taken up by an enterprise will be a permutation and combination of an approach from each of the three classifications, explains Tuteja.

According to Arun Gupta, there is no single approach that works for every company and a combination of factors will determine the right strategy and criteria for selection. The decision will depend on factors like what are the requirements (for instance, centralization, DR, etc.), currently what are the legacy systems looking like and what the future roadmap is like. The various approaches have their own respective advantages depending on what need and pain point they are addressing and depending on the data path and control path and the way it is placed and coupled. Sanjeev K, country head, IT, Philips Lighting India feels that mapping existing infrastructure, operating systems, servers capabilities with requirements to bring in storage ecosystem gives better insight into which one is fitting better for the company.

Challenges Abound
In spite of the concept of storage virtualization evolving and moving towards maturity, there still exist various challenges for CIOs considering or implementing it. The challenge does not stop at choosing the right approach to storage virtualization. On a very broad level, unwarranted worries about introducing yet another technology into the infrastructure is also a challenge to contend with. From the management perspective, virtualization introduces a new layer of management. “Virtualization will give simplicity, but the storage administrator has to manage the complexity that virtualization adds. Sometimes, the complexity is not worth the minor gains in simplicity,” says PK Gupta.

On the technology side, Agarwal opines that the concerns are relating to the interoperability between the virtualization component and the constituent storage devices and to some extent the suitability of the existing infrastructure components to integrate virtualization technology. Also, from the technical perspective, implementing virtualization calls for changes in the architecture.

Another roadblock in implementing virtualization that CIOs face is in creating a business case/need for it, considering that many times it becomes difficult to quantify the benefits from a business perspective. Arun Gupta sees the primary challenge in creating a realistic business case and convincing the management that over a 3-5 year period offers benefits over conventional computing infrastructure. There can be economic factors with respect to new investment for equipment and training.

PK Gupta points out that ensuring that there are more business gains and improvements over the added costs of virtualization and the added complexity is yet another challenge.

According to Henry Ellis, director, IMS, TEAM Computers, storage virtualization also requires technical experts to implement and manage. Migration from existing storage to virtual storage will require meticulous planning and designing so that existing/regular operations are not affected.

Proper Plan in Place
While challenges galore, evolving the right strategy to storage virtualization can help in overcoming some of the challenges and deriving the required benefits sought from it. The right strategy, in effect, holds the key to the success of virtualization.

According to Ellis, any organization that is going for storage virtualization, first needs to plan for the exact storage requirement for its servers and applications. There should be a proper plan in place, for migration from existing storage to virtual storage. Adding to this, Arun Gupta advises to keep an eye on growth year-on-year and not keep only the current requirement in mind.

According to Anand Naik, director, System Engineering, Symantec India and SAARC, some of the key factors to be considered include average utilization rate within the infrastructure, SLAs given for various applications, manageability issues operating in an environment of unmanageable complexity (multiple server platforms, storage devices, virtual machines, databases, applications-all with their own proprietary tools). Another important consideration as part of the planning includes the interoperability factors. Also, when more than one virtualization technique is in use, it is important to see whether they are complementary or not.

Sumit Mukhija, business development manager, Cisco Systems, India and SAARC opines that the resources need to be consolidated before they can be virtualized, as a consolidated infrastructure makes up a robust platform for implementing virtualization and automation of the resources.

Reaping Benefits
It needs to be understood clearly what values virtualization can deliver to any specific enterprise environment. According to Soumitra Agarwal, director, Marketing, Network Appliance India, the key issues that the CIOs today are trying to deal with are cost, complexity, data protection, cost efficiency and performance. Overall, the strategy should be to try and address all these issues.

According to Naik, some of the benefits that the CIO should be targeting from virtualization are flexibility to 'swap' in and out different storage hardware vendors, improved storage utilization rates, improved visibility and control, improved agility, ability to re-allocate storage quickly or in real time based on demand. In general, storage virtualization allows better utilization of storage resources, better productivity and manageability through unified storage management and enhances business continuity. Thereby, addressing some of the concerns that CIOs are facing today. Mukhija, points out that increased storage utilization can lead to reduced capex and faster and dynamic provisioning of storage space and centralized management and control over storage resources can result in reduced opex.

Specifically in terms of tapes, Sunny John, country manager for India, Quantum explains that today the data size is growing exponentially and back up windows shrinking and restoration is to be done in short time. “VTL can be the right approach to help customers achieve the back up window and ease data management in a better way,” he adds.

The Indian Scenario
While it is still early days for storage virtualization to gain a significant foothold, the Indian market is gradually waking up to embracing virtualization and the adoption rates are expected to pick up in 2007 and beyond. Already large enterprises, including banks, telcos and manufacturing houses with large data centers and complex environments are seriously looking at storage virtualization as a way forward.

So, now is the ideal time for CIOs to get educated on what storage virtualization is and what is available in the market, and start asking the vendors some tough questions.

Shipra Arora
shipraa@cybermedia.co.in

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