The newest addition to the storage managers platform is "storage
virtualization," but just what is it and what does it mean to your storage
environment? In easy terms, storage virtualization allows the
administration of storage as a utility, much as we treat water or
electricity. If your user or application needs more storage, it becomes a
simple task to allocate additional resources from a "storage pool."
The "storage pool" today requires a SAN (storage area network) for
implementation. The early SAN adopters walked through the minefields and
have paved the way for more general acceptance of the technologies involved.
While the initial complexity of the SAN seemed overwhelming, today's SAN has
become much easier to manage, and new tools are being developed that will
enable an even broader acceptance. Not to say that there are not some
pitfalls that must still be overcome, such as a much more robust zoning and
device masking tools, and a better more flexible reporting mechanism. While
many companies are struggling to overcome the "homogeneous" environments of
the past, there are more and more that recognize the fact that for true
"virtualization" to take place, you must be able to recognize and control
many different vendor (both storage and system) architectures. The "any to
any" paradigm is on the horizon, and the software and hardware needed to
implement it is available today.
About the author: Jake Williamson is a systems engineer for Vicom Systems, Inc.
Editor's Note: We provide user-submitted tips as a service to our searchStorage members to help foster other comments and advice. This tip has not been checked in detail for its technical accuracy. Instead, we rely on our community members to police themselves via our tip rating system and by sending in follow-up comments to tips@searchstorage.com about a specific tip or tip author. We appreciate your help in making searchStorage.com a more successful and collaborative community of storage professionals.
