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Virtualization

Both Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) have emerged as key enabling technologies to empower today's corporate IT departments. Either technology can help to ease management, assist in disaster recovery implementations, and provide better scalability and improved flexibility for your information storage needs. Despite the improvements that SAN and NAS deliver, they still fail to arrive at the ultimate goal of storage resource management; complete storage virtualization.

Virtualization is based upon the premise of "Transparent abstraction of storage at the block level". To put this into simpler terms, virtualization removes the physical relationship between disk drives and the servers that access them. A virtualized storage system creates a storage pool out of all the disk drives in the storage system and lets you create volumes from this pool for your computer systems to access.

If you consider how a standard storage system operates you can see the benefit of virtualization. Within a standard data storage system, each disk drive is assigned to a particular volume. Any time you need to adjust the size of that volume, it may require that you backup all the data on it, take it off-line, recreate the volume and restore your data.

In a virtualized system, each volume is assigned a piece of the total storage pool. When you need to change the size of a particular volume you just assign more of the pool to that particular volume. If your pool has no free space you would have to add more drives to the pool. If you had another volume with free space that you could use, you would reassign that space to the volume that needs more capacity. All of this is done in real-time without requiring a backup or taking any of your data off-line.

Another feature you can get with virtualization is volume replication. Replication will let you make an identical copy of any storage volume you have. You could use this to duplicate an important database so you could implement an upgrade or perform testing without affecting your businesses day-to-day operations.

Currently virtualization is a feature available on a handful of SAN storage systems. These implementations have a high cost due to the underlying cost of the SAN hardware. Only companies that have many computer systems with large information storage needs that fluctuate regularly should consider virtualization using a SAN at this time.

For those with lower budgets there are some software virtualization packages available as well. Because these solutions are hardware independent, you can implement one on any storage hardware that you currently own. Although they are more affordable, they are limited to sharing storage pools across a LAN, which often fails to meet the performance needs a company is looking for. Still, for smaller corporations with a few storage servers who need greater flexibility a software virtualization package can be a worthwhile investment. Virtualization can provide the best performance, easiest management, best capacity utilization, and greatest flexibility of any type of storage solution and does this all in real-time without any downtime. If you could see a use for this technology within you company look at the resources below to learn more.

Advantages:

• Hardware virtualization:
  
   
  • All systems attached to the SAN are guaranteed high speed storage access.
  • Provides virtual, customizable drive volume as needed.
  • Can create clones and snapshots image of existing data volumes to enhance backup functions and provide data mining capabilities.
  • Can reduce or even eliminate backup windows.
  • Higher availability.
  • Easier to manage.
  • Improved disaster recovery capabilities.
  • Storage flexibility - quickly move resources when and where you need them.
  • Non-disruptive scalability.
  • Recovery of data while storage is On-line.
  • Better Database performance.

   

• Software virtualization:
   
  • Hardware independent.
  • Inexpensive in comparison to a hardware implementation.
  • All LAN users have access to the storage pool.
  • Provides virtual, customizable drive volume as needed.
  • Can create clones and snapshots image of existing data volumes to enhance backup functions and provide data mining capabilities.

Disadvantages:

• Hardware virtualization:
  
   
  • Requires SAN based network in order to be implemented.
  • Virtualization functions limited to those connected to the SAN.
  • Requires vendor specific hardware.
  • Operating system support varies by manufacturer.
  • Expensive.

  
   

• Software virtualization:
  
   
  • Limited to LAN access to virtual volumes.
  • Can create LAN Bandwidth issues.
  • Operating system support is limited.
  • Limited interoperability with multiple file systems.

How can virtualization deliver a good return on your investment?

• Allows IT administrators to deploy storage as needed.
• Storage allocation is no longer fixed by disk size so only the amount required is assigned.
• More efficient storage deployment, decreasing overall disk costs.
• Provides for volume snapshots, online backups are available instantly.
• Storage deployment can now be centralized decreasing IT management costs.

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