Gartner has identified virtualisation as an important component of data storage technologies and storage market leaders are increasingly embracing virtualisation as a key part of their strategy.
Josh Krischer, Gartner`s European VP and research director of enterprise servers and storage, is on record as saying the greatest value of virtualisation will be for customers using heterogeneous storage.
IBM`s TotalStorage channel manager David Baugh agrees. "Virtualisation gives maximum flexibility to any storage area network (SAN) and helps organisations avoid vendor lock-in."
He explains that virtualisation delivers increased SAN change capability, which means data can be moved between storage pools, and storage can be added or replaced dynamically to respond to business needs without disrupting applications or hosts systems.
Baugh lists tiered storage and better disk utilisation as another two important reasons for virtualisation in the storage environment.
"Tiered storage means being able to store the right data to the right disk for the right cost, which is the building block for information lifecycle management, and typically disk utilisation can be improved from the recognised industry average of 50% to around 80%," says Baugh.
"Everyone in the storage industry has either moved to virtualisation or is beginning to move in that direction because of the compelling benefits from being able to automate workflows in a more flexible environment," says Baugh.
However, Baugh cautions that not all storage vendors have the breadth of capability required to deliver effective solutions that require skills in operating systems, servers, databases, storage and networking. "You need all of those areas to make it work and deliver the real benefit on an end-to-end basis," he says.
Baugh cites British Telecom as an example of how the productivity, utilisation, availability and responsiveness gains from storage virtualisation can deliver business benefit.
"British Telecom`s teleconferencing division, with a 5TB SAN storage infrastructure, was able to demonstrate costs savings of $600 000 in the first six months, attributable to reduced people costs during storage configuration changes."
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