For some time now growing organizations have responded to exponential data growth and the need for more storage capacity for their different applications by simply buying new disk storage systems. An additional server here, a storage area network there. It worked well enough in the short term but because organizations – particularly those in the healthcare, retail and government sectors – were essentially building separate and dedicated storage islands, data management complexity increased and so did costs. Not to mention the resource constraints – both physical storage resources and human resources – IT organizations face if this complexity and growth remains unchecked.
Among the many pitfalls and challenges related to these heterogeneous storage environments:
1. Poor storage utilization rates of different SANs
2. Increased time to administer the storage
3. Expensive to purchase snapshot/replication licenses on multiple SANs
4. Difficult to migrate data between storage systems
5. Increased energy and floor space costs
That’s where storage virtualization comes in – [Read more…]
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