There is what I call a lot of "soft" information circulating throughout virtualization nation relating to the acceptance and growth of this technology. Depending on who you talk to, and what form of virtualization you are discussing, we have either reached some level of wait-and-see skepticism, settled into a state of mature stability or cleared the decks for skyrocketing growth.
One common notion is that where VMware doth dwell, no infidel hypervisor shall tread -- in other words, VMware shops are impregnable fortresses that are happily locked into ESX and not looking for any directly competitive products. Another notion would have us believe that some portion of VMware stalwarts are open to overtures from Microsoft regarding a possible dalliance with Hyper-V, but not Citrix, whose technology they admire from afar, but don't want to invite into their virtualization living rooms, as it were.
(The more I learn about Citrix, the less I view them in this perennial outsider's role, but that is a topic for another day.)
At any rate, a recent reader poll conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Steve O'Donnell in his "The Hot Aisle" blog puts this issue in an interesting perspective. In a late September poll he did of his enterprise readers, O'Donnell found that quite a few of them were willing to swing with more than one steady hypervisor partner.
To be specific, he found that:
- 44 percent of his readers currently use two or more hypervisors.
- 16 percent use three or more.
He posits four possible reasons for this scenario:
- Licensing fees for the proprietary products are driving enterprises to adopt a second free product .
- Vendor support arrangements are driving enterprises to support multiple stacks.
- Enterprises have poor technology set management processes and are not optimizing their software portfolios.
- The increasing maturity of Xen and Hyper-V is grabbing enterprise attention and wallet share (a "fact," O'Donnell declares), but VMware is not being displaced where it exists.
In support of his perspective, O'Donnell asserts, "My best guess is, it's likely to be a combination of 1,2, and 3." It would be folly to entirely discount possibilities 1 through 3, but I am most intrigued by number 4, and I am looking into actual instances of VMware being displaced. I look forward to sharing that information with you in the near future.
Question: Under what circumstances does it make sense for companies to deploy two or more hypervisors?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/01/2009 at 12:48 PM5 comments
This is starting to look like the Union and Confederate armies massing their troops in the farmlands of Pennsylvania before the Battle of Gettysburg.
With the announcement of its Citrix Ready Open Desktop Virtualization program to further escalate (that's war talk for "bring it on") large-scale enterprise virtual desktop deployments, Citrix claims it now has an arsenal (my word) of more than 10,000 products from over 200 vendors that have been validated as ready to deploy (to arms!) in production environments with the recently launched XenDesktop 4.
Citrix says the Open Desktop Virtualization program helps make virtual desktops a safe choice for enterprise-wide deployment by eliminating (sounds very Machiavellian) the guess work and ensuring customers that XenDesktop 4 has been tested to work with the software, hardware and services they already use in the IT environments today.
Citrix allies -- er, business partners -- who have committed their forces to Citrix are arrayed across a gamut of technologies, including data center systems, client devices, and management systems and services.
VMware, which is always spoiling for a fight with the Citrix challengers, will no doubt raise a sturdy corps of Technology Alliance troops -- check that, partners -- to meet and repel this latest challenge to their sovereignty.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/19/2009 at 12:48 PM4 comments
More from Toigo, Nov. 16, under "Another Cash for Clunkers," he reproduced a press release from AutoVirt -- it offers Windows data migration software -- describing how, in Toigo's words, AutoVirt is "taking up the slack by a couple more vendors, NetApp and Brocade, exiting the data management and pathing market."
From a virtualization perspective, the AutoVirt platform frees IT departments to execute physical to virtual server transitions without disrupting user access to data. It embodies a complete set of logic that is activated by user-created policies that automate their physical-to-virtual transitions. In this environment, users are able to implement virtual technology and reduce the number of physical servers they need to manage.
Specifically, AutoVirt announced the launch of a trade-In program for customers of Brocade's StorageX and NetApp's VFM file management products, which are now scheduled for end-of-life. Customers that wish to replace their current StorageX or VFM products will receive a 50 percent discount off an AutoVirt software perpetual license and one year of free product support. This offer applies to any of Brocade's StorageX, File Lifecycle Manager (FLM), MyView, and File Management Engine (FME) products, as well as versions of those products offered by resellers, including the NetApp Virtual File Manager (VFM) product suite, IBM StorageX, and Hitachi StorageX.
Brocade has stopped developing and distributing new feature releases and upgrades. In addition, customers will see annual maintenance costs rise 10 percent each year until support is completely discontinued in 2012.
Customers interested in learning more about AutoVirt's StorageX Trade-In Program should go here, where they can also find a link to Brocade's original end-of-life announcement.
According to Toigo, "I would also encourage folks to look at Novell Storage Manager (NSM) and some of the products from Crossroads Systems. And, isn't this a cautionary tale we should be considering as we examine some of Cisco's woo in the hardware-centric data management space?”
Question: How much of a leg up does AutoVirt's virtualization capabilities give it against the competition? Let me know by posting here or by e-mailing me.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/17/2009 at 12:48 PM5 comments
Saying he is usually not one to pass along rumors, VRM contributor Jon William Toigo made an exception when he wrote on his Nov. 15 "
DrunkenData.com" blog, speculating on the ongoing merger of Sun and Oracle, and writing:
While I was in LA, several folks were again making observations I had heard while I was with some financial analysts in Wall Street a couple of weeks back. Everyone keeps saying that problems have cropped up in the Sun acquisition by Oracle. If true, and if for some reason the acquisition does not take place, the recent layoffs by Sun would likely leave the company non-viable when the dust settles.
If you are a Sun shop today, that might mean something to you.
What impact would the failure of Sun and Oracle to complete their merger have on the virtualization market? And if you're a Sun shop, are you worried or coming up with a game plan for a worst-case scenario? Let me know what you think here or by e-mail.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/17/2009 at 12:48 PM1 comments
With all din over what The Big Three are up to with desktop virtualization and VDI, it's easy to miss out on what some of the other players are doing. Sun is a prime example. It just announced the availability of Sun Ray Software 5, which the company says enhances virtual desktops and helps increase data center efficiency.
Sun describes the new software as a secure, cost-effective solution that "delivers a rich, virtual Windows, Linux or Solaris operating system desktop to nearly any client device, including Windows PCs and Sun Ray clients."
As part of the Sun desktop virtualization portfolio, many of Sun Ray 5's features will also appear in the upcoming release of Sun VDI Software 3.1, which is designed to deploy server-hosted virtual desktops running inside virtual machines to a variety of client devices.
By way of comparison, Sun Ray Software 5 was created to 1) deploy Sun Ray software to Sun Ray thin clients or PC's in a more traditional server-based computing model, or 2) deploy Sun Ray Software in conjunction with VMware View Manager.
Sun gets the uber access thing that is rapidly becoming standard fare for virtual desktop vendors. The first example that comes to mind is Citrix's Flexcast delivery technology, which reportedly gives customers the flexibility to deliver any type of virtual desktop, to any user, on any device -- and to change this mix at any time.
Sun's answer for Sun Ray Software customers is Sun Desktop Access Client, which provides end users with the flexibility to utilize their existing Windows laptops or desktop PCs as an alternative to Sun Ray thin clients, and to access data and applications in a centralized, virtual desktop environment.
With this software, Sun says "Customers now have a simplified, user-friendly means of accessing the Sun Ray infrastructure , which can help to extend the life of current PC assets and reduce the environmental impact of frequent desktop refreshes."
Despite the now hackneyed mantra of doing more with less, I get the impression that in the wake of the Vista flameout, and in the afterglow of the early positive buzz around Windows 7, many users are more eager to update their PCs than they have been in quite a while. Still, I guess, it's nice to know that there are other options besides wholesale capital investments when it comes to updated "PC assets."
Which would normally bring us to the soulless, utterly sanitized, and ultimately all-but-useless quote from a beta user. But in this case, since Sun didn't even bother to find anyone to "quote" other than an inhouse Oracle IT guy, I'm going to pass on the wooden prose.
Sun Ray Software 5 is available now for $100 per concurrent user for the perpetual license. It can be downloaded here.
Does Sun have what it takes to succeed in the desktop virtualization marketplace? Comment here or e-mail me.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/12/2009 at 12:48 PM1 comments
In the course of my recent discussion with Tom Bittman, a VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner, I asked him to describe the current state of Hyper-V. He started out by lauding Microsoft for including the hypervisor in Windows Server 2008 R2 (better late than never, in my opinion), and noting that Microsoft will benefit from a certain amount of new business that will automatically default to them.
That was pretty much the end of the good news, as Bittman went on to discuss a couple of pretty significant problems obstructing the future of Hyper-V. The first one is faced not only by Microsoft, but also Citrix, Red Hat and all the other aspiring virtualization platform vendors: How do you make inroads into VMware's rock-solid user base?
When it comes to large enterprise customers, he said there is very little hope because the "vast majority" of them have very little interest in switching. "Even small businesses that we survey who have already started with VMware have little to no interest in switching," Bittman commented.
That is problem one, and the smaller of the two. Problem two is a bigger, architectural problem that he was told about by R2 beta users. As he explains it, in a Hyper-V environment, every physical host has a copy of Windows that is used as the parent OS. It manages the I/O drivers and is home to any management agents that are installed.
"If I want to use PowerShell, I'm also using the parent OS for that," he declares, "so what you end up with is one big, fat, single point of failure."
And that's not the end of it. Enter problem three: Every time it's necessary to patch the parent OS, it is also necessary to take down all the VMs.
"In a small environment, if I've got 100 virtual machines running on 10 or 20 servers, it's not a big deal. But in an environment with thousands of VMs -- and I've got clients who are pushing 10,000 virtual machines -- having to take down those hosts to patch the OS is not an option."
Which is sweet music to VMware's ears.
Question: Did Microsoft commit a major faux pas in the design of Hyper-V? Comment here or e-mail me.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/10/2009 at 12:48 PM25 comments
In the wake of Citrix CTO Simon Crosby revealing to Alessandro Perilli of virtualization.info that Citrix would be "shortly fully sourced" (see "Citrix to Open-Source XenServer"), I got to wondering how his perhaps loose-lipped comment was playing internally at Citrix, and how the company was dealing with it. Upon searching the Citrix site, I came to the conclusion that the company was dealing with it by ignoring it. That could be a function of just sort of hoping that the whole thing would go away, or maybe Citrix was thinking that it simply wasn't important enough to spin one way or the other.
In the immediate wake of Crosby's comments, the implications of a fully open-sourced XenServer didn't seem to be particularly promising or foreboding for any members of the major hypervisor platform cabal.
Still, I was curious, so I contacted Citrix and asked for an interview on the topic. Always quick to respond, they got back to me with an offer to interview Crosby when he gets back from his current, international trip. They also provided a somewhat circuitous, three-paragraph statement that seemed to have a lot of well-intentioned goodness for the XenServer community in its first two paragraphs.
However, the third paragraph seemed more to the point, and I am including it here:
"Citrix XenServer is 100% free and based on open source code, but it is not 100% open source--there are components like the Windows drivers that Citrix has invested in and developed specifically for XenServer. By providing XenServer free of charge, we make it easy for customers to gain the benefits of virtualization via free download or as a built-in capability in our core XenDesktop and XenApp products. This strategy also gives us a competitive edge over VMware, which does not have a comparable product to XenApp and its competitor to XenDesktop does not currently scale comparably."
The gratuitous and highly debatable shot at VMware shot aside, I am led to believe that given a choice, Citrix as a whole would have been just as happy if Crosby had kept his mouth shut.
Question: Is this a tempest in a teapot, or is there more to this story than meets the eye?
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/05/2009 at 12:48 PM2 comments
I recently had an interesting, fact-filled conversation with Tom Bittman, a VP and distinguished analyst for Gartner, who had just returned from the company's Gartner Symposium, where he was force-fed so much good info that his head was in danger of exploding when we spoke. Fortunately, he made it through our conversation without any untimely cranial events.
Although we hit on several topics, including private cloud computing (in a show of hands, 75 percent of Symposium attendees said they viewed it as a core technology), Citrix ("They are literally caught between a rock and a hard place"), and interoperability (when VMware sees it is in their interest), I'm here today to talk about Bittman's take on the dynamics of virtualization adoption at small businesses with 100 to 999 employees.
Gartner recently did a survey of 1,394 of these small businesses in nine countries around the world. One of the questions put to participants asked if their organizations had started investing in virtualization or if they planned to do so during 2009. Some 41 percent of U.S. respondents said they had started before 2009, while 35 percent said they are planning to virtualize during 2009.
Bittman is impressed by those numbers. "If you look across the entire world, what we basically see is virtualization doubling, so the number of people who did it before 2009 is doubling," Bittman declares. "Roughly 70 to 80 percent of small businesses will have started by the end of this year. So two years ago, small business was not on the map, and now it's really taking off."
He also shared some info based on word of mouth and other anecdotal sources. Specifically, while large enterprises tend to virtualize as they add new hardware, meaning they do it incrementally over a 4-6-year period, small businesses tend to virtualize as a project. As such, Bittman says, they may go from zero to 60 percent to 70 percent or even 100 percent virtualization within the scope of a single project. It's not unusual for them to seek out a systems integrator who claims to have virtualization experience, and then just go ahead and take the plunge. He goes on to note that some of these gung-ho users also end up getting burned.
"My point is, we're going from a market that was driven almost entirely by large enterprise to the new engine of growth -- at least for the next few years -- being small business," he states, "and we're also seeing while large enterprises might be in the range of 25 percent penetrated, small businesses are currently single digits in terms of how many workloads are virtualized. However, we're saying by the end of next year, small businesses will have a higher percentage of penetration than large enterprises."
Sounds like a recipe for success that features Redmond as a prime ingredient.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/03/2009 at 12:48 PM0 comments
In response to a story posted last week at virtualization.info by Alessando Perilli, Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, revealed that Citrix is about to fully open-source XenServer -- not Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community -- but XenServer, its commercial implementation.
Crosby spilled the beans after reacting to Perilli's piece about Citrix joining the Linux Foundation. Following is Crosby's full statement: "XenServer is 100 percent free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capability, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes from Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head-to-head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present."
One other piece of fallout: Crosby claimed that XenServer costs VMware $300 million per year in lost revenue -- which is a good chunk of change for a company with $740 million in combined revenues from its U.S., international and services operations (these numbers reported last week. Click here for details).
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/29/2009 at 12:48 PM6 comments
For the third quarter of 2009, VMware reported U.S. revenues of $246 million (down 1 percent), international revenues of $244 million (up 9 percent), and services revenues -- including software maintenance and professional services -- of $250 million (up 33 percent).
The suddenly volatile Citrix reported a global decline in Q3 license revenue of 18 percent (-15 percent in EMEA, -5 percent in APAC, and +5 percent in the Americas). Revenue generated from license updates increased 7 percent, while technical service revenue from consulting, training and technical support increased 20 percent. Lastly, online services revenue increased 21 percent.
IDC's numbers illustrate the ups and downs of the virtualization market as it rides out the economic storm. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, 16.5 percent of all new servers shipped during Q2 of 2009 were virtualized, an increase of 14.5 percent over the same period a year ago.
However, actual shipments decreased 21 percent to 246,000 physical servers because of what IDC cites as a continuation of the 2008 decrease in this area. Similarly, worldwide virtualization software revenue declined 18.7 percent to $344 million.
On the product front, IDC says the server virtualization market is continuing its shift toward the use of paid hypervisors, with paid-for virtualization software now running on 60.8 percent of all new server hardware shipments virtualized in 2Q09, a 57.2 percent increase over the second quarter of last year.
IDC's take on these numbers is that they represent growing stability, and the market is poised for the beginning of a "significant infrastructure refresh cycle in the months ahead."
When it comes to new, virtualized server shipments worldwide, HP remained numeral uno with 36 percent of the market. Although those shipments were down 18 percent from Q208, they grew 1 percent sequentially. These numbers were primarily driven by HP's x86 ProLiant server business.
Despite a year-over-year decline of 22 percent, VMware retains its 1-2 punch as the leader in virtualization platforms. That decline was just a tick more than its 21 percent drop in x86 virtualization licenses. For its part, Microsoft saw its virtualization license shipments go down 16 percent, as a result of the continued depreciation of Virtual Server 2005. Hyper-V is the better-news Microsoft story here, as it jumped 54 percent one year after its official launch, which landed it into fourth place "while it cannibalizes itself into the number three position, past Virtual Server 2005," IDC notes. Parallels Virtuozzo rounds out the top five with license shipments declining 36 percent.
Citrix XenServer showed the largest increase, growing 108 percent during the past year, a jolt IDC attributes to the company changing its business model (IDC obviously had no idea of the full open-sourcing XenServer announcement when it issued this Q2 press release), and offering XenServer free with certain management functionality.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/29/2009 at 12:48 PM1 comments
I've always been a big believer in talking to IT people about their pain points and the benefits they are realizing from their technology implementations. Simply stated, users like to learn about what other users are up to, so in my opinion, one of the best ways of explaining the value of a new technology such as VDI is describing how it is actually being used in the real world -- warts and all.
Which brings us to the VDI implementation of Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations and Communications at St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York City. Edupuganti came to my attention via a conversation I was having with zero client maker Pano Logic, which prides itself on offering end point products that are utterly free of any extraneous computing capabilities.
And they mean it. According to Pano Logic, the Pano Device (the product's official name) "simply serves to connect peripheral devices -- a keyboard, mouse, VGA display and audio output -- along with other USB peripherals, to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system running on a server in the data center." No CPU, no OS, no memory, no moving parts.
Edupuganti has deployed 500 of these diminutive (3" x 3" by 2"), zero client devices across St. Vincent's 42 sites in the five boroughs of NYC, and he is very happy with the results, which include currently spending 30 minutes to deploy a new Pano Device compared to four hours for a fat client PC, and slashing St. Vincent's previously profligate energy consumption -- St. Vincent's was one of New York state's top five power consumers -- from 160 watts per PC to five watts per Pano Device. More good news: The eight St. Vincent's desktop engineers serving 7,000 users can now spend their time on more productive tasks than constantly dealing with hard drive failures and swapping out data from crashed machines.
This VDI system was born of necessity. The hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network was slowing down to the point where medical personnel using fat client PCs in the emergency room on 12th Street in NYC were unable to maintain current patient care and billing information because the bedside system used to perform those functions -- which is located at the data center on 33rd Street -- couldn't keep up with the daily onslaught of processing demands at the ER.
Unwilling to jerk the MPLS system out of 42 locations and start over with something else, Edupuganti researched the market and came up with a VMware VDI solution that included the Pano Devices. As he puts it, "We started browsing the web and we ran across this little silver box called Pano Logic and we started digging into it and we found it fit perfectly into the model we were thinking about."
In that VDI model, rather than being bogged down on the MPLS network, applications and the desktop run in the data center, and screen scrapes are done to an endpoint device.
It didn't take long for things to improve. "The minute we deployed the Pano Logic solution based on VMware's VDI solution, the lags went away, and within a week, medical personnel were able to catch up on almost 300 backlogs being closed in the emergency department," Edupuganti declares. "They love the performance, and they kind of actually became our marketing tool within the hospital. The word spread from the emergency department to the radiology department to the cardiology department and so on."
The Pano Devices are good, but they can't fix a balky network, and a balky network can cause problems for Pano Devices. As he puts it, if you have blips in your network, you will see a blank screen on the user workstation. He goes on to note that Pano Logic introduced its own network access protocol, which he says is better than RDP, the company's previous protocol of choice. Still, the new protocol is not perfect, and Edupuganti says that for use with YouTube, when he renders video, a lack of bandwidth can lead to lags or non-synched video/audio feeds.
"They're working on it," he says of the protocol problems. "It is one of our pain points, and it is on our wish list to be corrected."
That's a small problem compared to the big benefits St. Vincent's is enjoying.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/27/2009 at 12:48 PM9 comments
In fact, they have just revealed "accelerated momentum" for VMware vSphere 4, saying it has been downloaded 500,000 times by customers since becoming available May 21 of this year. The pace of these downloads has briskly increased to an average rate of more than 3,600 downloads per day.
Warning: Do not attempt to read the press release describing this good news while driving or operating heavy equipment because it is filled with so many hyperbolic, unvarnished, and extravagantly self-serving statements that your mind may briefly boggle, causing you to lose control of your vehicle.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/22/2009 at 12:48 PM6 comments
Citrix got a nice little boost recently in its battle to retain mindshare against VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V when it unveiled XenDesktop 4, a new VDI product that Citrix claims is unsurpassed in its functionality and ROI potential. That claim is why I lined up a VDI Point-Counterpoint feature between Citrix and VMware that will appear in the upcoming December-January issue of our magazine.
Anyway, things were going along nicely following the announcement until the pleasant buzz of success came to an abrupt halt when three different segments of Citrix customers registered complaints related to XenDesktop 4 licensing and packaging requirements.
In his personal blog of October 20, Sumit Dhawan vice president for Citrix XenDesktop, decided to man-up on the issue, and after briefly noting that XenDesktop 4 was still boffo, he laid out the bad news: the results of survey data and one-on-one conversations had made it evident that "we missed a few important things" on the licensing and packaging front during the initial product announcement.
According to Dhawan's blog, some customers required additional flexibility to license virtual desktops based on devices, rather than users. Other customers new to desktop automation said they needed a simple "VDI-only" solution with more flexible licensing to make the transition easier as they ramp up. The third group to complain were K-12 and university customers who wanted a simpler, more cost-effective program customized for the unique needs of the educational market.
So what did Citrix think about these criticisms? "The short answer is 'We agree,'" Dhawan declares. "Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us make sure XenDesktop 4 enables the broadest set of virtual desktop scenarios possible. As a result, we've decided to make three important enhancements to XenDesktop 4."
Those enhancements include a new device-based licensing option, a new VDI edition available in both user/device and CCU licensing, and a new campus-wide licensing program for customers in the education industry.
So what are we to make of this embarrassing scenario? Here's my take: Citrix erred by not fully understanding the needs of its customers, realized that the best business decision was to admit the mistake, and went about fixing it. They came out of the situation looking better than worse, and they probably locked in some new customers who would have otherwise gone elsewhere.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/22/2009 at 12:48 PM4 comments
Through the wonder of virtualization, Windows 7 now goes with Windows XP hand-in-glove, which is a claim the much-maligned Windows Vista could never make. In other words, the Windows XP Mode capability of Windows makes Windows 7 completely backwards compatible with XP, enabling users to run all their old software on Windows 7. This is possible because Windows XP Mode is a virtual machine powered by a new version of the Windows Virtual PC virtualization engine.
This new version of Windows Virtual PC is designed specifically for small and mid-market business users. It is integrated with the Windows 7 Shell as well as Windows XP Mode setup, and also provides support to many USB devices.
Just as it is the runtime engine for Windows XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC performs that same function for MED-V, which is a product of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance. MED-V is designed to provide IT pros with the capability to centrally manage and deploy Virtual Windows environments toward the laudable goals of reducing complexity, maintaining control and keeping costs low.
Now, onto the caveat: Windows XP Mode will only work on CPUs featuring AMD-V and Intel VT CPU-specific hardware virtualization features. In order to find out if your PC includes the AMD-V or Intel VT features, check with your PC maker.
Looks like Mac has one less arrow to shoot at the hapless PC.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/2009 at 12:48 PM4 comments
And now for few words on storage virtualization: Having been editor of a webzine on storage networking in my not-so-distant past, I thought I would weigh in on this technology, which is dramatically improving the lives of storage admins and enhancing productivity at the growing number of organizations that are implementing it.
One of the long-standing problems facing IT organizations has been more fully implementing available capacity in storage devices, such as disk arrays -- whoa, wait a second. Let me back up and state this correctly, I should say that the problem has been more fully implementing capacity when it is possible to locate and assess all the underused storage devices across far-flung legacy IT infrastructures, which is like searching for a needle in a haystack at some companies.
In virtualized storage environments, multiple physical resources are pooled into a smaller number of physical resources -- which may be as small as one -- which reduces complexity and enhances access. Virtualized storage can also be dynamically adjusted to meet rapidly changing storage demands. Another benefit area that has drawn particular attention is the green story that is created in the data center by consolidating storage resources, reducing overall energy bills and slashing the amount of required data center floor space. Throw in less time spent managing tasks that can be automated centrally, and you end up with a pretty attractive technology package with "ROI" stamped all over it.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/20/2009 at 12:48 PM3 comments