Storage : Consolidating Virtually

Virtualization and consolidation are inter-related technologies related to
the two pillars of simplification paradigm, that is if you are looking at
simplifying information technology. While consolidation is more of a physical
aspect of simplification, virtualization deals with the logical aspect of
simplification.

Put simply, virtualization is the process of aggregating smaller resources
(compute, storage and networks) to derive the cumulative power of all resources.
Alternately, virtualization can also be used to carve out smaller resources
from one large resource. The objective is to drive higher utilization of
resources or add horizontal scalability in the environment, says Surajit Sen,
director, channels, alliance & market, NetApp India.

Subram Natarajan, solution architect, IBM India/South Asia defines
virtualization more simply as having multiple storage devices. It makes sense to
leave them as they are, and then logically represent them in a single storage
device.

The concept of virtualization started many years ago on the servers. Server
virtualization is all about changing the old computing paradigm of one
application per server, breaking the rigidity between hardware and software
providing an environment to run multiple OS instances and applications side by
side on the same hardware. Server virtualization bundles the OS and a software
application into a virtual machine that is typically hardware independent. This
entire package of virtual hardware, OS and application is turned into a single
software file, says Rajesh Itagi, director, client services, EMC, India and
SAARC.

Storage virtualization is pooling of multiple physical storage resources into
a single storage resource that is centrally managed. Storage virtualization
automates tedious and time-consuming storage administration tasks enabling the
storage administrator do tasks like backup, archiving, and recovery more easily
and in less time, because the overall complexity of the storage infrastructure
is disguised, says Vikas Kakkar, sr technologist and data management
ambassador, Sun Microsystems. Storage virtualization is commonly used in file
systems, storage area networks (SANs), switches and virtual tape systems. Users
can implement storage virtualization with software, hybrid hardware or software
appliances.

Source: docs.huihoo.com

Adopting Virtualization

With the mushrooming of new types of connectivity devices and mobility of
users, there is the need to access information anytime and anywhere, resulting
in the need for continuous data accessibility. Combined with explosive data
growth, this creates a daunting challenge for IT organizations. Virtualizing
where applications run and how data is stored has been a good first step in
meeting the need to store, manage, manipulate, and distribute data across the
enterprise more efficiently, says Ashis Guha, country manager, Brocade India.

Power management has also become one of the key enablers for adoption of
virtualization in India. For a developing economy like India, there has been a
rapid rise in consumption of energy resources and greenhouse gas emission. And
with the global economy undergoing meltdown, for Indian enterprises it is
critical to justify IT spending by more sophisticated metrics than cost per
megabyte for storage.

Kakkar of Sun quotes IDC estimates that storage accounts for 37% of overall
data center power consumption; Gartner predicts that by 2009, half of the
worlds data centers will not have sufficient power to support their
applications.

And with the cost of electricity surmounting every day, power is an important
reason that businesses pursue virtualization. For every machine you dont run,
you save power and money! Customers with a large number of smaller applications
hosted in their data centers, namely verticals like IT services, development
organizations, BFSI, etc, are adopting server virtualization. On the other hand,
customers who have a large deployment of storage arrays, especially legacy and
modular storage are considering the adoption of storage virtualization. This
typically includes customers in the BFSI and IT services verticals.

Natarajan says that verticals like financial services and telecom are the
front runners, which is not surprising because with data explosion companies
operating in these sectors opt for virtualization.

Trends in India

Data explosion is a tremendous pressure on the limited storage
infrastructure of enterprises. And since enterprises cannot afford to increase
the number of data administrators at the same rate at which data is increasing;
they are left with no option but to adopt a technology that can manage this data
in an efficient manner. Therefore, the market potential of storage
virtualization solutions in India is huge and expanding. Storage virtualization
and storage management in India is being driven due to data explosion, cost of
managing data, better usage and understanding of data and automation.

Itagi however begs to differ as he believes that even though adoption of
storage virtualization and client devices is on an upswing, the current buzz is
focused on server virtualization.

Adoption of storage virtualization will be among customers who have large
number of legacy and modular storage which are currently hosting key
applications, and that those storage systems cannot be replaced immediately.
While server virtualization can be adopted at the initial stages of the
application and data center deployments, storage virtualization would be
considered typically when there is a large deployment of storage already in the
data center.

Says Sen, Virtualization as a technology is being keenly investigated in all
aspects of the data center. The first adoption of virtualization technologies
was in test and development environments, followed by consolidation of
lightweight servers like DNS, DHCP, AD, Webserves. Virtualization has made
steady progress over the last one year and had proliferated applications like
SAP, Exchange and SQL.

Consolidation Advantages

Consolidation is all about pooling resources to enable greater utilization
of assets with greater flexibility. Consolidation can be defined as an approach
towards optimizing technologies to achieve cost savings, improve performance,
and mitigate risks. This approach involves planning, optimization, and physical
migration of systems and facilities. Consolidation is applied to data centers,
servers, storage, applications, services and networks.

When people look at consolidation, they are looking at consolidating their
applications and servers into fewer footprints. This could be because of power
saving, moving from old technology to newer one. When moving to consolidated
platform, they enhance production applications by complementing with more
powerful storage architecture, says Natarajan.

With increasing pressure on Indian organizations to improve service levels,
increase in availability, reduced costs, and better manageability of IT
environment is the key. This can be achieved through data center consolidation.
Consolidating the data of the company also reduces the need for multiple
hardware boxes leveraging the option of doing Information Lifecycle Management
in a single storage system thereby reducing data center footprint, power
requirement, etc. This drives towards effective utilization of IT resources and
cost reduction. All this and much more attracts companies in India towards the
adoption of consolidation.

In order to keep up with rapidly changing market demands, customers have
focused on day to day business and ignored the growth of individual servers and
their dedicated storage. As these storage islands have expanded to more
significant capacity levels, total storage utilization across the enterprise and
the inability to share data between applications have become inhibitors to
further growth.

Guha of Brocade says rapid changes in hardware, technology, and capacity
demands are forcing enterprises to implement ongoing server and storage
consolidation and data migration strategies to optimize available storage
assets. Consolidation enables increased storage utilization by lowering
allocation for headroom leading to decreased storage capital expenditures by
enabling the purchase of storage on an as-needed basis. Moreover,
administrative staff productivity is increased as they are able to manage more
storage with fewer personnel. Application downtime is reduced and a centralized
network environment for storage and server platforms is created.

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in