2012 Prediction: DataCore Software
2012: Virtual Storage Gets Some Love
Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently authored a Market Report which I believe addresses the industry focus for the year ahead. In The Relevance and Value of a “Storage Hypervisor,” Peters notes: “…buying and deploying servers is a pretty easy process, while buying and deploying storage is not. It’s a mismatch of virtual capabilities on the server side and primarily physical capabilities on the storage side. Storage can be a ball and chain keeping IT shops in the 20th century instead of accommodating the 21rst century.”
We’ve virtualized servers, infrastructure for large deployments and even tackled desktops. Public and private clouds have arrived, taking the virtualization of resources to a much larger degree only with a different delivery model. In fact, if you look at the marketing of VMware, the words virtualization and cloud have nearly become interchangeable.
Indeed, a lot of progress has been made. Yet, while enterprises strive to get all they can from their hardware investments in servers, desktop and storage devices, a major problem persists - a data storage bottleneck. Ironically, even as some vendors team-up on end-to-end virtualization and cloud solutions based on software, the reaction to handling storage is often to throw another costly hunk of hardware at the problem in the form of a new array.
The time has come for the storage crisis to be resolved, the last bastion of hardware dependency removed, and the final piece of the virtualization puzzle to fall into place.
It’s also time for all to become familiar with a component fast gaining traction and proving itself in the field: the storage hypervisor. This technology is unique in its ability to provide an architecture that manages, optimizes and spans all the different price-points and performance levels of storage. The storage hypervisor allows hardware interchangeability. It provides important advanced features such as automated tiering that relocates disk blocks among pools of different storage devices - even in the cloud - keeping demanding workloads operating at peak speeds. In this way, applications requiring speed and business-critical data protection can get what they need, while less critical, infrequently accessed data blocks gravitate towards lower costs disks or are transparently pushed to the cloud for “pay as you go” storage.
ESG’s Peters states in the Market Report; “The concept of a storage hypervisor is not just semantics. It is not just another way to market something that already exists or to ride the wave of a currently trendy IT term.” He then goes on to make his main point on the next step forward; “Organizations have now experienced a good taste of the benefits of server virtualization with its hypervisor-based architecture and, in many cases, the results have been truly impressive: dramatic savings in both CAPEX and OPEX, vastly improved flexibility and mobility, faster provisioning of resources and ultimately of services delivered to the business, and advances in data protection.
“The storage hypervisor is a natural next step and it can provide a similar leap forward.”
Yes, 2012 will be the year virtual storage gets some love. It’s only natural…and long overdue.
