What has been the impact of storage virtualization on SAN deployments? |
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| 09 Jan 2007 | Greg Schulz |
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I really have not seen storage virtualization driving storage area network (SAN) deployment. For example, if you look at IBM's SVC software, IBM estimates 2,100 plus installs (and growing), and those installs do involve a SAN of some type. What's not clear is whether a SAN was installed to support the SVC installs, or SVC was just added to address a particular issue. SANs are about connectivity -- not intelligence. Most SAN adoptions have been to simplify connectivity and improve storage sharing, so storage virtualization has been more of a complementary technology rather than a driving technology. [For more relevant product details, see the All-In-One Buying Guide to Storage Virtualization.]
If you can bring virtualization technology in to address particular pain points and solve problems for you without causing a management burden, you may have yourself a winner. Moving forward, SAN connectivity will increasingly benefit from the intelligence added by virtualization and other building blocks like virtual switches, etc. that we keep piecing together to meet that end objective.
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