Cloud Computing & Hosted PBX News – Dallas, TX
Cloud Computing & Hosted PBX News – Dallas, TX

How To Maximize Virtualization Benefits With Storage Management

As enterprises adopt storage and server virtualization strategies, they are realizing that monitoring, reporting, and managing such an environment actually increases the complexities of storage management. This has been a challenge even in a physical environment as administrators try to understand the resources upon which business-critical applications depend. This assumes a higher degree of complexity in a virtual environment, wherein physical storage is now separated by two or more degrees from the application, making a manual approach very cumbersome and filled with possible inaccuracies.

This is corroborated by statistics. According to the recent India specific findings of the Symantec 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, adoption of server virtualization is widespread, with 57 percent of Indian firms implementing server virtualization. The report also reveals that as virtualization and private cloud technologies become more widely adopted, the cost and performance of storage is becoming increasingly top of mind. Of those who have implemented storage virtualization, 59 percent stated improvement in storage performance and 57 percent cited uptime and availability and reduction in capital expenses an important goal.

A virtual shift

Typically, storage virtualization abstracts storage, separating logical data access from physical access. It offers a bridge between one or more physical storage arrays through one or more storage virtualization methods that present logical elements to a host. By doing so, regardless of whether the storage originated from one or many devices, it is delivered as though it originated from a single device.

Traditional storage management solutions are not able to see the entire data path, from application to storage. Nonetheless, storage administrators require deeper visibility of the entire path—from virtualized host(s) to the virtual storage—as well as the capability to map the virtual storage to the physical storage devices. Also, few have tools to observe and correlate the outage of a back-end array sitting behind a storage virtualization appliance to its potential impact on a business application.

Management complexities also arise from server virtualization approaches to delivering application services. Traditional storage management becomes ineffective, as they see only the physical server with no insight into the applications running on virtual servers.

What is the way forward?

Storage resource management (SRM) technology addresses the demands and management complexities that virtualization presents. With SRM, IT can decompose logical storage through the virtualization layer all the way back to one or more physical resources, including SAN connectivity, thereby easing storage management in the virtual enterprise.

An adequate SRM solution provides continuous monitoring that offers visibility into the health of every major storage component. It also tracks and measures statistics to help determine loads and potential configuration issues that might impact performance. Virtual server as well as discovery and mapping of storage pool capacities and allocation to guests is another big benefit offered by a proper SRM solution.

Sometimes the complexity of a storage network may result in undetected problems and changes, an adequate SRM solution will provide continuous monitoring that offers visibility into the health of every major storage component. Administrators will be proactively alerted on intermittent errors, failures, and environmental conditions such as battery states and temperature so they will be able to maintain the operational readiness of their storage environment.

With a SRM solution properly deployed, administrators can understand which applications are running on virtual machines, when those virtual machines are moved from one physical server to another, and what storage resources are being consumed by each application, whether physical or virtual.

Making the most of virtualization

Regardless of the benefits offered by virtualization, as data volumes are growing, managing storage will become more complex, even in the virtual environment. The benefits of this technology can be maximized by implementing appropriate SRM tools that help enterprises overcome new challenges that virtualization introduces in the storage realm.

As cited in the recent Symantec report, in terms of expectations versus reality, on implementing storage virtualization, the average shortfall between the goals expected to achieve and what was actually achieved was 31 percent, with disappointments in areas like CAPEX, keeping up with emerging technology trends, and agility. This indicates that organizations are not realistic about what is possible and what to expect.

This is an opportunity for enterprise IT to leverage and maximize the benefits offered by virtualization by deploying the right tools to ensure that expectations are met. SRM is the recommended technology for the same.

Source

Brian