Storage Virtualisation: A Virtual Necessity Or Yet Another Passing Fad?

Many of my last blog posts have talked generically about virtualisation and how to make it really work for your organisation and how to achieve the best ROI.

For some companies this is new ground as far as virtualisation goes, but some have been virtualising their storage environments for a very long time. So, in this blog, we talk about what storage virtualisation is, why do it and how it will benefit your business.

In today’s information-centric world, control of data is absolutely essential for the majority of organisations. For regularity compliance, security and disaster recovery, businesses need to keep their data safe.

They need to know where it is now and where it will be in 10 years time. So, all organisations have some sort of data storage system whether it’s simple tape back up or a more complex fibre channel SAN arrangement.  

The trend now is to virtualise storage environments because of the well heralded benefits; it brings with it the tools to enable disaster recovery, high availability, service integration, capacity planning … the list goes on.  

Like any other sort of virtualisation it’s the process of abstracting the logical from the physical and for storage this means the removal of a server having to control its own storage.  

For most, the simplification of storage management and the performance improvements are key drivers for adoption.  

For others it may be the need to have data synchronised between, say, production and business continuity sites without the overhead of middleware or the complexity of multiple start and end points associated with direct storage.  

For direct storage, cost is not always a key driver for implementation, but when you really analyse the ongoing activities involved in supporting the management, planning, provisioning and repair of direct storage involved, then, it becomes apparent that change would be helpful!