Welcome to Intelligent Business Transfer
With storage virtualisation, storage capacity is removed from the individual user or server and is instead deployed in single or shared pools. Storage capacity is allocated to and accessed by the user or server via the network and can be adjusted to meet actual demand at any given time. Proactively managed by the IT team, disk space can be fully utilised without wastage. Capacity planning, data classification by importance, backup and restore and peak-time balancing all become easier.
Structured and unstructured digital information, including files, databases, voice and images continues to grow at 50-70% per annum. This growth must be managed and new technologies deployed in order to contain the inevitable increase in costs. Disk prices have been dropping at approximately 30% year on year, yet the overall cost of managing data is increasing. Over the last 10 years, system consolidation has been taking place. The utilisation of disk arrays is at 20-35%, indicating there is a large portion of the investment lying idle. Storage virtualisation technologies now enable the sharing of physical storage resources across more tasks and across the system architecture.
This will enable:
- Further storage consolidation to take place, increasing the utilisation of disks and tapes
- New levels of data protection so that recovery times are significantly reduced to support the demand for a continuous service to the business
- Categorisation and migration of data to lower cost storage based on the frequency of access and agreed service levels
- Reduction in volumes and duplication of stored data. Storage virtualisation addresses the key management goals of reducing costs and improving the user experience, spanning operational goals and environmental citizenship.
Controlling the cost of the information explosion
Deploying storage is an expensive component of the IT budget, tying up resources to maintain the information on which the business operates. Denying users access to resources they request is difficult. IT Managers have generally addressed the risk of running out of storage by over-provisioning disk storage on a server by server basis. Although simple to implement, this results in many disparate pools of storage and, typically, storage capacity lying idle across the server estate. The principle of storage virtualisation is to consolidate all of the disk capacity into a single or reduced number of pools, which can be accessed, as required, by any server on the network. This simple step plays a major role in establishing a basis for better utilisation of the physical disk and more effective management of the data. Storage virtualisation plays a major role in delivering better levels of utilization of disk arrays and tape resources. Storage virtualisation offers the opportunity to better utilise disk resources and manage the data through:
• Increasing storage utilisation with better provisioning (thin provisioning)
• Simplified and enhanced data protection practices such as the introduction of virtual tape libraries to support the data protection and archiving practices.
• Enabling data to be managed across cost effective tiers of storage
• Reducing the occurrence of duplicate data
• Taking complexity out of the storage infrastructure with a common file system delivering a single point of access to view all files (Global namespace).
• Better utilisation and consolidation of storage resources leads to lower management and operational costs.