The heritage and future of virtualisation

Information, in its multitude of forms, is becoming more and more important, even for those applications such as e-mail, which was previously not thought of as imperative.

As a result, market research firm IDC has found that since 1996 most enterprises have been adding storage capacity at a rate that exceeds 50% per year.

With this in mind, companies and suppliers needed to think of new approaches to storage. They needed to consider management strategies that allowed them to contain cost increases and ensure that shared storage projects were implemented effectively.

As storage has been reviewed, developments have been made specifically related to virtualisation and information lifecycle management. There is a common misconception that virtualisation is a new development but has actually been in existence for over 30 years.

RAID was really the oldest form of virtualisation and was typically used where a client was no longer talking to one physical hard drive but to 20, where the detail had been extracted and the server was programmed to think it was only talking to one hard drive.

Today, however, virtualisation consists of a range of applications that depend on client requirements. An example of an application is where organisations not only have multiple physical disks from one supplier acting as a single storage device for a server, but they also have multiple disk arrays from various organisations. In this instance, companies can make use of an EMC disk array, an IBM disk array and a HP disk array all appearing to a server as one logical unit. This allows organisations to stay up to date with the latest hardware developments and does not lock them into or restrict them to a single vendor.

Another example where virtualisation can apply is when organisations plan a three- to five-year refresh cycle on hardware, there is a continued requirement to move data seamlessly, and with no disruption from old to new equipment.

Through virtualisation, a server will not differentiate between an EMC or IBM array, so it is able to migrate information from legacy to new technology without a problem.

Virtualisation also allows companies to create gold, silver and bronze classes related to the information in their storage solutions, as they are able to move data between the various disc arrays as the lifecycle changes. For example, if your organisation is about to roll-out SAP then your development environment will be important for that period of time; so it will be placed in the gold class so it moves quicker and more efficiently. However, once SAP is stable, the development environment will become be less important again and can be moved to either the silver or bronze class ensuring that the information in the gold class is always being maximised for speed and efficiency.

Virtualisation is constantly evolving and we are anticipating significant developments with regards to network virtualisation in the years to come. In the future we will be using a form of grid storage, where companies will use modular units of storage that have their own intelligence. Organisations will be able to configure the modular units to take on different personalities. For example, if a company wants a high performance disc and requires it to be a backup for the target it can be programmed to take on that personality. It will be a uniform piece of hardware taking on a very different characteristic each time you require it.

Obviously this development in network virtualisation is much further down the line but there certainly is enough research and development happening in the labs of organisations such as HP and EMC to get us there. Organisations can rest assured that the industry is working together to provide them with the most cost-effective and efficient solutions available.