Talking storage in a virtual world

Virtually all organisations generate and handle increasing amounts of data critical to their business. IDC estimates data is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 52 percent. Storage virtualisation adoption will be vital to any organisation trying to manage this growth.

As data increases in organisations both big and small, businesses want to store it without buying more hardware. That’s where virtualised storage comes in and where the storage service is abstracted from the physical hardware. This means that the stored data volumes can reside on the most appropriate type of storage based on price, performance and availability, irrespective of the vendor.

By virtualising storage, organisations have a more flexible storage infrastructure that can adapt and change to meet business needs without affecting application up-time. In non-virtualised models, migrating storage belonging to an application is time-consuming, complex and requires extensive application down-time.

In a virtualised environment, storage can be moved to the correct location whilst the application is on-line, in real-time. This means that an application’s storage can be moved from slower to faster storage, expensive to cheaper storage or from old to new storage. This flexibility eliminates outages, down-time and control issues. End-users may benefit from storage virtualisation, through application down-time for storage.

The cloning of application data to lower-cost storage for development and testing enables application quality to be improved during the development cycle, providing a better end-user experience once the application goes into production.

With virtualisation, end-users benefit from a lack of impact of storage on their business applications. Those applications can operate at optimum efficiency at any given time.

Using virtual storage extensively
Simon Elisha, head solutions architect at Hitachi Data Systems believes Australian customers already use this technology extensively.

“Both mid-tier and larger organisations are utilising this technology to have a more flexible infrastructure for the future. Many organisations are adopting storage virtualisation as part of a technology refresh of the storage environment to enable both easier data migration as well as a more powerful storage platform for the future,” he said.

According to Elisha, resellers see virtualisation as becoming ‘standard’ for customers moving forward.

“Currently, we are witnessing adoptions rates of around 40 to 60 percent for new customers because they can see the clear value that virtualisation brings,” he said. “Storage virtualisation has moved far beyond the ‘hype’ phase to a practical, reliable, tried-and-tested solution.”

Greg Hutton, business development manager for South Pacific at HP’s StorageWorks also believes having virtualisation is key in pooling resources, reducing costs and allowing automation to save money for customers. HP works closely with EMC’s VMware.

“End-users are spending too much money trying to manage things better. I think the local market is in tune with virtualisation. No-one has unlimited IT budgets and everyone is trying to make the infrastructure more efficient. Most IT departments have a virtualised environment, or, at least are looking at them,” he said.

Where is the demand?
Mid-market service provider Brennan IT has also been looking at virtualisation for the past couple of years and has seen real demand for the products in the past year.

Chuong Mai-Viet, NSW state manager at Brennan said the main product Brennan uses is VMware (a subsidiary of EMC), running on hardware from either HP or EMC (depending on its end-users’ needs).

“What we have been seeing is a lot of storage consolidation. There’s a number of huge players with disaster requirements that want their compliance easily managed,” he said.

Mai-Viet said the implementation of the technology can be a bit hard to manage, but on the disaster recovery side, Brennan’s clients in the mid-market space can get it managed for a fraction of the price of buying more hardware.

“What you have is the ability to replicate the server, end-users can put on a heap of applications. When you are running an SMB, you don’t have the luxury of putting applications on all servers,” he said. “Once you have virtualisation in place you have a much smoother operation because it picks up images and puts on new hardware faster.”

According to Mai-Viet it costs a fraction of the price of having to roll out and replicate a copy of a disaster recovery server. If something goes wrong then fixing it is just a matter of ‘flicking a switch’.

“What we are finding is clued-up IT managers using virtualisation, although with business-style clients, CFOs still need some education. VMware is good at spreading the virtual word,” he said.

Mai-Viet said the virtualisation storage market is picking up now and quite strongly for the service provider. Brennan already has six new prospective clients playing with VMware and next year there looks to be even more customers demanding the technology.

What a great host
Lorenzo Modesto, general manager at managed hosting provider Bulletproof Networks said the service provider saw the benefits of providing hosted virtualisation storage services to end-users of all sizes
since 2000.

“Last year in the third quarter, we launched a VMware hosting service, dedicated to running a virtual infrastructure. We have a number of clients interested in our services, not only developers,” he said. “The reason comes down to resource control, freedom from an underlying OS and overall availability levels. You can only offer a 99.995 percent SLA with a VMware-based product.

Modesto said the reason this is so important is that fully virtualised offerings combine all the benefits of physical dedicated hosting with the full range of virtualisation benefits, making it a far better product than physical dedicated hosting.

“We are seeing only a small number of people not wanting it. If resellers hadn’t been able to offer dedicated hosting, they can do it now. They can be extremely quick to market ... it must be done properly and managed by someone who knows what they are doing,” he said. “You would need your head read to do it any other way.”

The art of Xen
It’s not only service providers taking on storage virtualisation. In October 2006, Express Data signed a sole distribution agreement with US-based virtualisation software vendor, XenSource. The distributor is still pushing XenEnterprise virtualisation software that lets users run many virtual machines on one computer/server.

John Glendenning, XenSource vice president worldwide sales, said the product competes directly against proprietary virtualisation systems developed by VMware, owned by EMC.

XenSource has managed to gain the support of proprietary software giant Microsoft. It signed a collaborative development agreement with the vendor in July 2006 to create interoperability between Xen and Longhorn. Microsoft’s next server operating system, Microsoft will also support Windows running on XenEnterprise.

The vendor is also popular with component makers Intel and AMD, both releasing processors modified to run Xen. Citrix and HP are XenSource supporters as well.

At the time Glendenning told CRN the vendor wanted no more than 10 resellers on ED’s books. Ian Kelly, communications division manager of Express Data said the distributor has signed up six resellers so far.

Kelly said the software complements the distributor’s server-centric computing and virtualisation product line-up, which includes Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Citrix, Novell, CA, Symantec and Wyse software.

“When you look at virtualisation, end-users can’t just look at software deployment. They need to be able to reduce data centre costs and get the most out of hardware,” he said.

Kelly said with XenSource, resellers need only take up to 10 minutes to get up to speed with deploying technology resellers.

“There are no costs involved with certification, however resellers need to make sure they get certified,” said Kelly.

Cracks in a virtual world
While resellers have a choice regarding what type of storage virtualisation to use, the world has not become virtual just yet.

In July, AMD hosted the ‘Flavors of Virtualisation’ panel in San Francisco, where virtual heavyweights such as AMD, Microsoft, VMware, Sun Microsystems, SWsoft and XenSource gathered.

Virtualisation’s biggest challenge is the ‘potential fragmentation’ of a loose confederacy of rival software vendors working together on open source integration initiatives, said XenSource vice-president of marketing John Bara.

Microsoft’s Bob Tenczar, director of product management in the Windows Server Division, admitted virtualisation poses new challenges to the software industry.

“Licensing is a broad challenge. Virtualisation has unlocked software from hardware, but the world is not virtualised yet. It’ll be some time before that happens,” Tenczar said.

“I think the local market is in tune with virtualisation.”

“What we are finding is clued-up IT managers using virtualisation.”

“When you look at virtualisation, end-users can’t just look at software deployment.”