Utility computing, enabled by the virtualisation of IT infrastructure, is being heralded as the future model by which IT will support high-performance organisations. It offers a flexible and efficient way of delivering IT processing power and applications at exactly the time and place needed, while minimising overcapacity, redundancy and unnecessary costs.
With a virtualisation layer in place, organisations can share their computing capacity across all business systems, leading to an overall reduction in redundant data centre capacity and an increased use of base assets.
Many companies have already undertaken a process of optimisation and standardisation of their IT infrastructure to cut costs, increase efficiency and improve the transparency of costs and usage.
The process has resulted in the standardisation and consolidation of an infrastructure that has often evolved and grown organically, rather than be built against a technical strategy.
As a result, many organisations are now ready to take the next step and establish a dynamic and scalable utility computing-style infrastructure, and are looking at virtualisation to help provide the tools and methodology.
While the primary focus is likely to be server virtualisation, storage and network virtualisation will follow closely.
The business benefits from storage virtualisation are substantial, especially in areas such as tiered storage and information lifecycle management.
Carl Greiner, senior vice president at analyst Ovum, says that for many organisations storage is getting out of control.
‘Companies are realising that they need to keep their data on the most appropriate media to be more effective and reduce the high cost of storage,’ he says.
The business challenges of adopting a virtualised storage solution include the need to move away from a silo-based infrastructure model towards one of pooling and sharing resources.
While the approach can raise significant organisational and budgeting barriers as the independence of existing departments is challenged and budgets are centralised, the overall benefits of performance and increased capacity are huge.
Given the constant pressure on IT departments to do more with less, centralising the storage environment so that resources can be shared is a sound strategy.
Andy Holpin, from consultant Morse, says the real issue that needs to be addressed first is control.
‘Often the IT department is restricted from optimising the use of its storage assets because it lacks an overall view of the equipment held by the business,’ he says.
The widespread adoption of storage area networks (Sans) means that many companies have created some kind of centralised storage. However, this has often resulted in islands of storage, as departments start running their own San as a means of adding extra storage capacity when necessary.
Recent research by Vanson Bourne discovered that of 100 IT directors questioned, 45 per cent admitted that their company still purchased equipment on a departmental basis.
In terms of capacity, project-based purchasing results in low use, as businesses factor in more capacity than is actually needed to cater for information growth and risk, and because budgets are usually more available upfront rather than on review and subject to a later request. The result is that many companies and IT departments suffer from a sprawling, uncontrolled and underused environment.
While management, control and efficient use of storage resources are big drivers for change in the eyes of the IT department, outside factors are also influencing the move towards centralised and virtualised storage according to Una Du Noyer, head of infrastructure and security at technology consultant Capgemini.
‘Information lifecycle management (ILM) is a huge buzz in the marketplace that everybody wants to embrace, and without storage virtualisation, ILM is impossible to implement,’ she says.
Regulation is another big driver. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley has put pressure on storage, especially when you have to prove that you can continue to operate in the event of a disaster.’
Although techniques for storage virtualisation have been around for a long time, with volume managers and RAID systems, what is new is that virtualisation is moving away from the physical level and into the service level. Companies are now taking the idea of storage virtualisation seriously and looking to adopt scalable enterprise solutions.
Adrian Sunderland, chief technology officer at managed business services supplier Griffin, says that the introduction of internet small computer system interface (iSCSI) and internet protocol (IP)-based storage has brought storage solutions to the fore. ‘IP storage becomes just another device on the network. Virtualisation brings us more efficient use of space, time and management,’ he says.
The whole storage picture is only going to get more complicated. Data requirements have increased dramatically with the unstructured data boom, making the challenge more complex. Also, new wireless technologies, such as RFID, are being employed that generate phenomenal amounts of data.
While key business data may be transitory, in that once the key information has been mined and captured it can be deleted, it still has to be appropriately stored and retrieved.
John Holden, research analyst at Butler group, says that these technologies have the potential to cause an explosion in the amount of data that systems have to process and store.
‘Those organisations that do not begin the process of storage infrastructure transformation now could well be completely submerged by the data volumes generated by millions of wireless tags attached to every conceivable entity,’ he says.
Virtualisation technology is at different levels of maturity in different hardware environments. Driven by the emerging vision of utility computing, a wide range of vendors are now rapidly developing standards-based virtualisation technologies for Unix, Windows and Linux. Storage virtualisation is still an immature market in the early adopter phase with multiple techniques from vendors being promoted.
‘Virtualisation standards are not necessarily well understood and as a result the vendors are still doing their own thing,’ says Ovum’s Greiner.
Storage virtualisation is part of a bigger picture as companies move towards a wholly virtualised data centre. While technology and infrastructure are moving forward, companies have to make challenging decisions about what constitutes their own storage policy and exactly how they are going to apply it. A balance has to be achieved between keeping everything, which is expensive and makes finding information more difficult, and not keeping enough data so that the satisfactory operation of the company becomes more difficult.
‘Storage has moved up the list into the top 10 concerns for companies,’ says Du Noyer. ‘It is now something that is being thought about, invested in and solutions are actively being sought.’
Initially, storage virtualisation reduces manual overhead and brings cost reduction through better and more efficient use of storage. Couple this with an ILM policy which uses and moves data through different tiers of storage, and the benefits can increase significantly.
Robert Passmore, research vice president at analyst Gartner, says the most important benefit is bringing the virtualised resource under software control. ‘This simplifies business operations and storage management and reduces management effort by enabling issues associated with installing, configuring, monitoring and managing physical storage to be isolated to a small group of well-trained storage administrators,’ he says.
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