Benefits of Virtualising your Storage

The main benefit of virtualising your server estate – is to maximise the utilisation of the hardware and reduce the physical server footprint - has been known and proven to I.T. professionals for many years and adopted in some way by most.

 

In addition to massively increasing the efficiency of the server estate and reducing the procurement and running costs of each (virtual) server, new functionality becomes available that would not otherwise be possible. This includes things like migrating the server from one piece of hardware to another, taking instantaneous backups of the server as a whole and moving it from one storage system to another, all without any disruption.

 

But typically many organisations stop there, yet most of the benefits of virtualisation can be brought to the storage too. By virtualising the storage platform you gain improved functionality and more advanced storage features. Not only does storage virtualisation enable more common features such as instantaneous point-in-time snapshots for back-up for example, but can also bring new features such as:

• Instantaneous cloning of volumes to allow testing and development of production data without any impact on the live services
• Manual and automated migration of volumes between different tiers of storage within and sometimes across storage systems
• New ways of protecting data and restoring system resilience after hardware failures allowing for faster rebuilds while reducing or eliminating the performance impact on the system
• Advanced functionality such as compression or de-duplication of tier 1 production data can be done at the storage level and is transparent to the applications and servers
• Offering both NAS and SAN connectivity protocols from a single, unified storage system to streamline system management

 

Not only does storage virtualisation bring these features to your environment along with a performance boost, but often does so in a smaller footprint which can dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership.

 

So we know what storage virtualisation can bring, but how is it achieved? Typically virtualisation of storage “achieves location independence by abstracting the physical location of the data”, or creates a new virtualisation layer (or pool) of storage and all the magic happens at that layer, rather than at the actual physical disk block level.
 

As oppose to data volumes residing on dedicated RAID arrays which need specific characteristics to meet the application’s demands, volumes are created at this storage pool layer which can be made up of multiple arrays meaning more performance and greater disk utilisation thanks to the large number of disks in the pool, yet offering ease of storage design and management.

 

Should you require more information on Virtualising your Storage, please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity Representative.

 

 

Edward Yates - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

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