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THE HEARTBEAT OF YOUR STRATEGY

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 5 - August 2007

Storage needs to deliver the right information, to the right place, at the right time. Without that, your business is in danger of suffering the equivalent of
a cardiac arrest, says editor Brian Wall

Storage resources across an organisation need to be effectively allocated and dynamically reallocated, based on business policy and the value of the data to the business - even when that constantly changes.

One of the key characteristics of an adaptive enterprise is the ability to sense change in business demand and automatically deploy resources to meet those demands. Virtualisation, when implemented in the right way, makes this new management capability possible.

Some of the benefits of virtualisation include a reduction in cost by simplification of the management of disparate heterogeneous systems, increased asset utilisation and a dramatic reduction in storage provisioning times - from weeks to hours and minutes. But how do you ensure that you have the right structure in place to make this happen? And which technology route do you go down? It isn't something you can afford to get wrong, so how do you safeguard your investment and reap the full benefits of a virtualised storage environment?

These are questions that John Rollason, solution marketing manager EMEA, NetApp, believes need to be uppermost in anyone's mind when considering implementing such a solution. "The ever-increasing amount of data that organisations need to store has led them to make continuous significant investments in their storage environments. The solution has often been to add multiple traditional storage architectures to support this data. These traditional architectures usually mean storage for an application is tied to specific physical disks or RAID groups (indecently the lowest level of storage visualisation). ILM strategies and information security requirements have only added to this complexity. The end result: inefficient, under-utilised storage environments that are difficult to manage and costly to scale."

Storage array virtualisation provides the key answer to this, he argues, by offering businesses new levels of performance, scalability and data management for sharing, consolidating, protecting and recovering data, while unifying existing storage infrastructures. And the proof of its success? "Organisations have typically seen their storage infrastructure costs cut in half by the use of virtualised storage," he states.

Essentially, two types of solution are available to achieve the benefits of a truly virtualised storage array. The first is to take a traditional storage array and overlay a virtualisation engine on top of it. This has the additional benefits of protecting existing storage investments and heterogeneous support. The second approach is to build virtualisation into the storage array in the first place, which Rollason claims is by far the most cost-effective approach to virtualise storage for new deployments. NetApp offers the V-Series platforms in the first category and FAS platforms in the second.

"A good virtualisation solution should look to decrease storage and management costs, while protecting and leveraging current storage investments, improving utilisation of existing storage investments, augmenting protection of critical business data and allowing the preservation of investment as the storage architecture evolves," he adds.

"These solutions unify block and file [NAS, SAN and IP SAN] storage networking paradigms, as well as advanced storage management technologies, such as data cloning, de-duplication and thin-provisioning under a common architecture. Simplified management, automation and security of this virtualised environment are also key."

In today's dynamic storage environment, businesses need to adapt rapidly to changing requirements and reduce costs, Rollason concludes. "Inflexible and complex storage infrastructures add cost, and reduce agility and the ability to aggressively pursue new opportunities. Virtualisation defines a storage strategy that addresses business challenges and benefits modern information-centric organisations. The business value is real."

It's certainly the case that virtualisation technologies are being seen more and more as the foundation of modern data centres, as IT managers seek dramatic improve- ments in resource and operational efficiencies, as well as overall responsiveness to business needs.

Scott McIntyre, vice president of software and customer marketing, Emulex Corporation, believes three key technologies are significant in this regard: server virtualisation, storage virtualisation and fabric virtualisation. While these are generally deployed as separate initiatives, IT managers are increasingly considering the prospect of a fully virtualised data centre infrastructure.

"There is a high degree of affinity between Storage Area Networks (SANs) and server virtualisation, because the connectivity offered by a SAN simplifies the deployment and migration of virtual machines," says McIntyre. "A virtual machine can be deployed on any physical server that has a connection to the SAN, rather than requiring its storage to be physically connected to its host server. Furthermore, a virtual machine can then be migrated to any other physical server that is also connected to the SAN and maintain the connection to its storage."

With the proliferation of server virtualisation, many IT managers have come to realise the benefits of virtualisation and begun implementing storage virtualisation strategies.

"Storage virtualisation is also highly correlated with SAN infrastructures, again because the connectivity of a SAN enables many of the benefits of virtualised storage," he adds. "A SAN-based storage device can be shared between multiple servers, enabling data consolidation. Conversely, a virtual storage device can be constructed from multiple physical devices in a SAN and be made available to one or more host servers.

Not surprisingly then, not only are storage devices being virtualised, but increasingly there is interest in virtualising the SAN fabric itself to consolidate multiple physical SANs into one logical SAN or segment one physical SAN into multiple logical storage networks.

"In response to the increased desire to also virtualise the fabric, the fibre channel industry devised virtual fabrics, which enable the configuration of logical, or 'virtual' SANs, which can be sized, tailored and managed to business needs, and effectively isolate potentially disruptive fabric events."

True data centre virtualisation is maximised with the implementation of all three virtualisation technologies - server, storage and fabric virtualisation - argues McIntyre. "While possible, it's unlikely that an IT manager will deploy all three of these virtualisation technologies in one fell swoop. Instead, IT managers should carefully analyse and determine their own phased deployment approach, and ensure that each step is fully compatible with the next. IT managers should ensure that future purchases of HBAs, and intelligent switches and appliances, meet the requirements for building towards the fully virtualised data centre."

Ten transition tips
PC and server virtualisation software can potentially shake up the entire IT world. Virtualisation technology allows a single system to run multiple incompatible operating systems - and their applications - meaning that long-standing barriers to flexibility and compatibility can be broken down, whilst dramatically improving hardware utilisation rate.

All IT managers should also look to recognise and appreciate the necessity for companies to run multiple operating systems without the financial constraints that purchas- ing new hardware and software can bring. Senior consultant Shane Colombo, of IT Infrastructure coaching company C&C Technology Consulting, offers 10 tips to help organisations transition to new software without incurring huge time and financial implications in the process.

1. Understand your infrastructure. Before making any decisions concerning virtualisation, it is important to understand your current infrastructure; this would include numbers and types of servers, operating systems, CPU and memory utilisation, application names and versions.

2. Not everything should be virtualised. Although virtualisation brings many benefits and may be used in a variety of environments, it is not necessarily the answer to everything. Operating system virtualisation will provide most benefit when replacing a physical server which is being under-utilised.

3. Understand your administration model. Where there is a server team responsible for the provisioning of new servers, for example, they may have to adapt the administration model in order to have the ability to create servers in the new virtual environment.

4. Understand what applications you have. Before virtualising any applications it is best practice to understand exactly what applications are included in the estate, what versions they are currently using and how they work.
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5. Capacity planning. Make sure you fully understand the infrastructure that will be used to virtualise your environment. You need to understand all components required to virtualise the proposed services, especially the specification and capacity of the chosen systems.

6. Know the technologies. There are a number of virtualisation opportunities (including server, operating system, storage and application), and many vendors offering products and solutions. Have a clear understanding of what vendors are offering, and how their products and solutions compare.

7. Make the best use of virtualisation 'tools'. There are a number of tools available to help with the implementation and migration from physical to virtual environments that will save time and money (with many of them offering 'drag & drop' style management interfaces).

8. Use the vendor and consulting community to help you understand the various virtualisation technologies available in the marketplace today. The solutions available are wide and can appear at first glance complex. Use the experts to enable you to confidently make informed decisions.

9. Understand the cost benefits first. Complete a simple return on investment analysis prior to submitting the business case for funding.

10. Virtualising some applications can be a complex affair. So make sure you prepare fully and use expert advice to understand how to make maximum use of the virtualising technologies. ST