Storage virtualization aids in performing common tasks that consume significant staff, IT, and production resources:
- Data migration across systems. Advanced virtualization technology reduces business and IT environment risks and improves operational efficiencies. Migration takes less time, less staff, produces less errors and little to no impact on production systems.
- Strategic alignment of business applications with the storage infrastructure to interactively match application quality of service requirements.
- Remote replication from any-to-any system, including low-cost disk.
- Integration of low-cost disk storage into high performance environments.
- Consolidation of several diverse storage environments into a single storage area network (SAN).
- Optimization of current resources and processes, and greater utilization of existing storage assets.
Storage virtualization is part of two ongoing, larger storage industry trends and innovations:
The move to place storage processing functions as close as possible (in the storage system controller) to the actual data being processed.
Industry Analyst John Webster points to this trend as a carry-over from the days of the mainframe. He sees the use of storage controller-based virtualization implementations like that of Hitachi Data Systems as the next phase of a larger continuum for delivery of a wide range of storage-related services from the storage controller.
The increasing commoditization of storage industry hardware components (disk drives, etc.).
With storage systems, this trend is playing out by separating or disaggregating intelligent storage software functionality found in the storage controller (the "head") from the underlying commodity disk (the “body”).
As Evaluator Group Senior Analyst Tom Trainer puts it, "Hitachi has separated the 'brain' from the 'body' of storage—the innovation from the commodity. Hitachi has clearly changed the playing field with its breakthrough in simplicity via its controller- based virtualization technology while competitors have continued to focus on monolithic disk arrays based on aging 20th century designs and increased network complexity."
"Storage Virtualization: Spin Free! Is more network complexity necessary?" - Evaluator Group, Inc., 2007.
And as Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Steve Duplessie puts it
"Hitachi’s Intelligent Virtual Storage Controllers simply make what should by now be an obvious statement. Drives within an array are in the commodity category. Their value inexorably decreases over time. On the other hand, array controllers and the software-based services layered on top, now deliver most of the value. Why not separate the two so that customers have the option of investing only in the part of the array subsystem that in fact delivers most of the value?"
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