Virtualization: Tales from the trenches

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While there's plenty of interest in storage virtualization, companies have delayed implementation for a variety of reasons. Here's how five companies took the virtualization plunge--with winning results.


Virtualization is the big buzz these days. Virtual servers are commonplace, and the "V" litany continues with virtual LANs, virtual SANs, virtual tape libraries and so on. Storage managers are clearly interested in virtualizing their storage systems, but while the technologies to do so have been around for a few years, companies are only now beginning to reshape their storage environments using virtualization.

We talked with storage professionals from five companies that have deployed, or are currently testing, storage virtualization to learn about their implementation experiences and how well the products are working in their production environments. The companies are using four different virtualization products: IBM Corp.'s SAN Volume Controller (SVC), StoreAge Ltd.'s Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Corp.'s TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) 600 and EMC Corp.'s Invista (see "

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Virtualizing with EMC Invista"). Despite a few problems and some early hiccups, all of the products have fulfilled the promise of storage virtualization--much to the satisfaction of their users.

This was first published in August 2006

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