As enterprises adopt storage and server virtualization strategies,
they are realizing that monitoring, reporting, and managing such an
environment actually increases the complexities of storage
management. This has been a challenge even in a physical
environment as administrators try to understand the resources upon
which business-critical applications depend. This assumes a higher
degree of complexity in a virtual environment, wherein physical
storage is now separated by two or more degrees from the
application, making a manual approach very cumbersome and filled
with possible inaccuracies.
This is corroborated by statistics. According to the recent India
specific findings of the Symantec 2011 Virtualization and Evolution
to the Cloud Survey, adoption of server virtualization is
widespread, with 57 percent of Indian firms implementing server
virtualization. The report also reveals that as virtualization and
private cloud technologies become more widely adopted, the cost and
performance of storage is becoming increasingly top of mind. Of
those who have implemented storage virtualization, 59 percent
stated improvement in storage performance and 57 percent cited
uptime and availability and reduction in capital expenses an
important goal.
A virtual shift
Typically, storage virtualization abstracts storage, separating
logical data access from physical access. It offers a bridge
between one or more physical storage arrays through one or more
storage virtualization methods that present logical elements to a
host. By doing so, regardless of whether the storage originated
from one or many devices, it is delivered as though it originated
from a single device.
Traditional storage management solutions are not able to see the
entire data path, from application to storage. Nonetheless, storage
administrators require deeper visibility of the entire
path—from virtualized host(s) to the virtual storage—as
well as the capability to map the virtual storage to the physical
storage devices. Also, few have tools to observe and correlate the
outage of a back-end array sitting behind a storage virtualization
appliance to its potential impact on a business application.
Management complexities also arise from server virtualization
approaches to delivering application services. Traditional storage
management becomes ineffective, as they see only the physical
server with no insight into the applications running on virtual
servers.
What is the way forward?
Storage resource management (SRM) technology addresses the demands
and management complexities that virtualization presents. With SRM,
IT can decompose logical storage through the virtualization layer
all the way back to one or more physical resources, including SAN
connectivity, thereby easing storage management in the virtual
enterprise.
An adequate SRM solution provides continuous monitoring that offers
visibility into the health of every major storage component. It
also tracks and measures statistics to help determine loads and
potential configuration issues that might impact performance.
Virtual server as well as discovery and mapping of storage pool
capacities and allocation to guests is another big benefit offered
by a proper SRM solution.
Sometimes the complexity of a storage network may result in
undetected problems and changes, an adequate SRM solution will
provide continuous monitoring that offers visibility into the
health of every major storage component. Administrators will be
proactively alerted on intermittent errors, failures, and
environmental conditions such as battery states and temperature so
they will be able to maintain the operational readiness of their
storage environment.
With a SRM solution properly deployed, administrators can
understand which applications are running on virtual machines, when
those virtual machines are moved from one physical server to
another, and what storage resources are being consumed by each
application, whether physical or virtual.
Making the most of
virtualization
Regardless of the benefits offered by virtualization, as data
volumes are growing, managing storage will become more complex,
even in the virtual environment. The benefits of this technology
can be maximized by implementing appropriate SRM tools that help
enterprises overcome new challenges that virtualization introduces
in the storage realm.
As cited in the recent Symantec report, in terms of expectations
versus reality, on implementing storage virtualization, the average
shortfall between the goals expected to achieve and what was
actually achieved was 31 percent, with disappointments in areas
like CAPEX, keeping up with emerging technology trends, and
agility. This indicates that organizations are not realistic about
what is possible and what to expect.
This is an opportunity for enterprise IT to leverage and
maximize the benefits offered by virtualization by deploying the
right tools to ensure that expectations are met. SRM is the
recommended technology for the same.
- Anand Naik is Director, Technology Sales,
India & SAARC at Symantec