STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION TAKES SHAPE

Neeraj Gandhi
Express Computer

Virtualization has been making waves in the IT industry for quite some time now. Curiosity regarding what it is all about and successful early deployments have combined to make this otherwise convoluted term an integral part of the IT lexicon.

Broadly speaking, there exist two components in the virtualization market, server and storage virtualization. While the former has been a fixture of the IT landscape for many years now, the latter is a comparatively younger phenomenon. In addition, it is server virtualization that drives storage virtualization. Collectively though, both of them are aimed at better utilization of the available resources, reducing complexity and increasing productivity. Server virtualization has hit the bull’s eye, and its market has witnessed huge year-on-year growth.

That said, changing business needs coupled with exponential growth, had fueled the demand for IT infrastructure upgradation. With storage forming a critical portion of the overall infrastructure, enterprises have started looking seriously at managing their storage requirements to support their business needs. Therefore, businesses have started looking at storage virtualization as a plausible solution.

According to Frost and Sullivan, the storage market in India is wide open. Banking on the tremendous rise of IT and ITeS companies, the country has seen an unanticipated need for storage. “Last year saw a boom in the disk storage market when revenues almost doubled, over the last couple of years. We expect to retain the same trend this year. India has not only established itself as the fastest growing disk storage market worldwide but has started necessitating improved technologies to organize these market assets. While analyzing this current trend in the Indian storage industry, the potential of virtualization is huge,” said Arun Nirmal, Research Analyst, Technical Insights, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan.

The storage virtualization market

No other innovation in storage has managed to grab so many eyeballs as has storage virtualization. The reason is simple, this technology enables simplified storage management in a virtualized server environment. It helps in improved recovery and provisioning, application/ storage performance and better uptime with less downtime during storage upgrades.

In terms of the market, Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec India & SAARC, said, “Storage virtualization is yet to pick up in India. Most Indian enterprises are either not using it or are planning to use it at a later stage. Today, only 19 percent of the enterprises have deployed storage virtualization solutions. But soon, 85 percent to 90 percent of enterprises will be using some form of virtualized storage to take full advantage of SAN technology. In the coming years storage virtualization will become a crucial factor in driving a company’s choice of storage vendor.”

What to expect?

The amount of data in businesses is increasing in an explosive manner. In turn, it is putting tremendous pressure on the limited storage infrastructure that is available. The irony of all this is that enterprises cannot afford to increase the number of data administrators at the same rate at which data is increasing. In such a scenario they are left with no option but to adopt a technology that can manage this data in an efficient manner.

According to Frost and Sullivan, developments in virtualized storage would be slow but steady, and that the concept would catch on with a lot of enterprises. Besides, there are multiple hidden factors that combine to form one big challenge for the virtualization industry. The main challenge would be the lack of trust on the virtualization front among large enterprises, which leads to improper storage planning which directly affects adoption. The second major challenge in this domain is from OEMs. “The general consensus among OEMs is that success in virtualization could lead to possible cannibalization of their other storage products. This creates a state of OEM noncompliance in making virtualization as a standard. Therefore, the onus is on the small manufacturers to demonstrate virtualization as a mainstream technology,” added Nirmal.

“Factors like data growth, increased storage needs prompt changes in the storage environment. There are a growing number of situations where building a SAN alone is not sufficient in terms of efficiency and system flexibility, and a virtualized solution is needed. Virtualized storage addresses typical enterprise concerns in the face of growing business challenges like manageability, scalability and availability. It reduces downtime due to failures or configuration changes,” said Venugopal.