Easing storage angst with virtualisation

"The findings suggest customers are doing their homework before jumping into the market," he said. IDC's Penn said there's no one-size-fits-all solution. As resellers help customers simplify storage management, partners must consider security, scalability and flexibility, interoperability, standards and maintenance. Resellers shouldn't pitch storage virtualisation as the end goal as it isn't realistic.

"Instead, it will solve a multiple of problems so pitch it that way," he said.

Penn argued storage virtualisation represented a major consulting and services play for the channel. A core challenge is the fact that many sites have lots of legacy equipment, which is often not supported by virtual packages.

"Make sure the data migration is supported by a virtual engine," Penn said. "Work with a virtual engine supplier. Test it out first and prove the concept before committing yourself.

"The IT manager has to put it through its paces in terms of the application, storage, arrays and network configuration. Run the system in parallel. Resellers can do this evaluation and help a company with the pain of ensuring it can actually work."

EMC's Gold agreed many companies are striving to implement more automated ways of managing the datacentre, and need more visibility across the network.

He encouraged partners to use EMC's Smarts tool to assess the storage environment and where virtualization makes sense.

"Resellers can build a model of what the environment looks like, and how virtualisation would fit in," he said. "Often management tools put in place get broken if they go to a virtualised environment." DiData's Altit said it was important to assess whether the existing technology could cope with an infusion of virtualisation.

"When an existing storage array doing snapshots, for example, is mixed with a virtual engine over top, how will the functionality change. Can it cope with it?"

Thin provisioning mix

Vendors are also mixing virtualisation with thin provisioning to offer customers another reason to scoop up storage virtualisation.

Essentially, thin provisioning lets IT administrators limit the allocation of actual physical storage to what applications immediately need. Hitachi Data Systems marketing manager, Tim Smith, said the vendor had released its first implementation of enterprise-class virtualisation with thin provisioning, dubbed the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V solution.

The technology utilises thin provisioning at the virtualization services layer, providing substantial reductions in space, power and cooling across the enterprise.

The launch was significant, Smith said, as users had typically struggled with the seamless integration of storage virtualisation and thin provisioning. "We haven't been able to deliver thin provisioning across a single array in the past. Virtualisation now enables this capability," he said.

EqualLogic is also banging the thin provisioning drum. Casey said it had expanded its portfolio of software features to include thin provisioning in its PS Series storage arrays. EqualLogic's new storage resource management tools also give users the ability to turn thin provisioning on and off as needed for any volume, he said.

"IT departments can avoid buying and managing excessive amounts of disk storage," Casey said.

IDC's Penn said vendors were blending thin provisioning and virtualisation as an added benefit.

"This is good news for a database administrator who typically overprovisions so he doesn't have the nasty experience of having blown the end off the database," he said.

De-duplication boost

The demand for de-duplication technology has also cranked up a notch. De-duplication can be used to save a single instance of a file or database. Penn said it created a set of pointers, rather than saving multiple times, so users got big space savings.

DiData's Altit said data de-duplication was one of the biggest technology rollouts in the history of data management and backup.

"No longer can you separate storage from backup, archival and data management. So data de-duplication is one of the most significant things in data management today," he said.

With organisations grappling over bandwidth limitations and data overload, this technology was ideal in both remote office environments and central offices.

"Remote offices have big issues with backup. This technology will reduce the amount of data backup and address their very large pain point," Altit said. "This is a piece of technology that will make a fundamental difference to an organisation's overall cost of ownership."

EMC has extended its de-duplication technology to data stored in virtualised environments. The vendor's newest de-duplication software release, Avamar version 3.7, will support its VMware virtualisation tools. Dimension Data has become the first EMC channel partner to sell the Avamar product suite to the local market. EMC's Gold said the technology was ideal for remote sites, and could translate into a 90 per cent reduction in the amount of stored data.

Quantum has also embraced de-duplication, recently launching the Stornext 3.0 software. This enhances data sharing and provides data de-duplication for reduced data retention costs.

Country manager, Craig Tamlin, said data de-duplication saved users money by lowering capacity requirements and enabling data to be retained on fast recovery disk for much longer periods of time.

"Data de-duplication is a hot topic. We can break data info small chunks, block-lets, in order to see if we've seen it before and whether it needs to be stored again. The concept is enabling space and cost savings," he said.