Managing Storage Solutions Easily With Virtualization

According to an independent white paper published in April 2009 by Tek-Tools and written by George Crump, the virtualization analyst and founder of Storage Switzerland, it's important not to overlook the effects of virtualization on a company's complete IT resources. 

Crump's paper cautions against ignoring the effects of virtualization on other elements of the infrastructure and in particular hones in on the issue of server virtualization's effect on storage management. 

According to the paper, as virtualization has spread rampantly throughout enterprises, many compromises have been made on physical systems. 

Unfortunately, says Crump, these compensations can counteract the benefits that virtualization is designed to bring to the IT environment in the first place. 

The paper suggests that if the connection between server virtualization and storage is ignored, the ROI of virtualization projects is actually reduced. 

However, says the paper, if integrated, virtualization and storage management can reveal vast amounts of allocated but unused storage, this often translates into wasted resources on many levels. 

And, considering most virtual storage infrastructures use high performance, highly reliable and expensive tier one storage, Crump says that the savings associated with identifying these wasted resources can be significant. 

In one example cited in the paper, eight terabytes of storage allocated to a relatively small virtualized environment was identified as unused.