Storage Nation

This is the second post in my series on data center transformation. In my first post , I offered up several warning signs that indicate why it is time to take action and transform your data center to be agile, sustainable, and business-oriented.

There is an increasing interest in storage virtualization as seen an the increasing number of articles and blog posts on storage virtualization. In the last few days Rick Vanover posted a very balanced overview of storage virtualization for Datamation where he reviewed some of the many options.   Carol Sliwa posted a Storage Pro Guide to block-based storage virtualization for SearchStorage which cited some use cases. One of the use cases was the City of Coquitlan (Canada) who is a 2010 Computerworld Honors Laureate award winners in IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program and a customer of Hitachi.

Five Requirements for Storage Virtualization In my previous blog, I identified the following requirements for Storage Virtualization. The first two requirements were already identified by SNIA in 2001. The additional three requirements are addressed by Hitachi in our implementation of Storage virtualization in the USP V/VM. These five requirements are: 1

SNIA defined storage virtualization in 2001 and focused on two important requirements. First was the abstraction of storage functions to enable application and network independent management of storage and data. Second was the application of virtualization to add new capabilities to lower level storage resources

I was recently asked by an analyst firm to review a survey that they intended to send to end users to evaluate the extent of virtualization in the data center. While most of the survey asked very relevant questions, when it came to storage virtualization, it was all over the map, primarily because there was no clear definition of storage virtualization

Last week  the Register’s Chris Mellor covered EMC’s intention to propose  “unified storage/server systems  that span the globe and function as a single virtual resource pool, using YottaYotta technology” as announced by Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s president and COO of Information Infrastructure Products group. Those who were in the storage business during and after the dot com phase at the turn of the century, remember the dozens of startups that were trying to leverage the introduction of Storage Area Networking with storage virtualization appliances. EMC also entered the market with a storage virtualization appliance called Invista

One of the objectives of storage virtualization is to separate the management of the physical storage from the application, the server, and the network view of the storage, so they can continue to operate while the storage is refreshed, tuned, migrated, maintained, replicated, or replaced.

Paula Sequeira, posted This comment on my post on New Considerations for Tiered Storage .

Hitachi Data Systems has been very successful selling the benefits of Storage Virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning.

IT costs are increasing about 7 to 8 % per year. But when you look at industry spend on storage hardware that spend has been flat for many years, primarily due to Moore’s law. Storage densities continue to double about every 18 months