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Government Cloud, Technology

Virtualisation Technologies: Past, Present and Future

19 January 2010

In the last few years there has been a tremendous amount of interest in virtualisation. Initially the interest was in pure play server consolidation, with its corresponding savings in capital expenditure and management – still a very compelling argument to customers. Today, and looking forward, we are seeing customers, looking to take virtualisation to the next level of becoming an availability enhancer.

Application availability, and the resulting business continuity, can now be improved because Virtual Machines (VMs) can be quickly brought online on other hardware in the event of a failure – a much quicker solution than building a new physical server (this is also significantly less costly, in terms of time and money, than complex application specific clustering solutions). Availability is additionally improved because hardware maintenance can be performed non-disruptively (by moving a live VM to another server without disruption). In other words, virtualisation has evolved into a solution that helps IT deliver better service levels (SLAs) to the business using the same technology that lets them reduce expenses!

Beyond that we are seeing an ability to simplify Disaster Recovery, lower its cost and improve its reliability based on advanced functionality that fully orchestrates and automates the recovery of systems after a disaster, either locally or at a remote site, using tools like VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, which tightly integrates with EMC’s storage replication capabilities.

There is also an increasing realization that virtualisation technologies can impact the desktop computing infrastructure (not just servers), simplifying the rollout and patching of thousands of desktops. Crucially it allows centralized management of an organisation’s desktops from within the data center where IT has advanced technologies and strong process control which usually do not exist outside the data center. Besides efficiency, there are huge positive security implications to this centralized model.

Storage Virtualisation for Businesses
In its purest form, virtualisation allows users to add storage capacity using inexpensive, commodity disk and tape drives and to dynamically manage those storage resources as virtual storage pools with little regard for what physically resides on the back end. Market acceptance has been slow, with a number of different approaches by different vendors, but is expected to take off later this year. Intelligent storage services have historically been implemented within storage systems or in host-based software running on servers.

Today’s enterprise-class infrastructures typically include multi-vendor server environments, diverse connectivity technologies, and multi-vendor tiered storage environments. Organisations require the ability to allocate any storage to any application based on the needs of the business, and to do so non-disruptively. Networked storage virtualisation enables organisations to deliver the right information at the right performance level and the right functionality to the business at the lowest total cost.

Virtualisation also promises to enhance overall platform independence, along with system flexibility and utilization. Maximising system flexibility and utilization are critical to ensuring that a storage investment is delivering the tangible benefits and dividends its owners planned on. Overall, virtualisation is not simply a fancy way of viewing and interacting with data, but can tangibly improve the performance of enterprise storage and the value of business information.

In addition, virtualisation breaks the dependency on the underlying hardware. It creates a virtual layer over the servers/storage from multiple vendors and creates a pool where various applications can be dynamically provisioned as required by the customer. In essence, virtualisation enables the creation of logical (virtual) representations of physical IT resources such as memory, networks, servers, and storage — that perform as if they were actual resources. In virtualized storage environments, applications can see and interact with these logical components, which are independent from but able to interact with their physical counterparts including SANs, disk arrays, tape components, and other storage media.

The combination of server and storage virtualisation provides an unmatched IT infrastructure foundation in terms of flexibility and agility, which enables an IT department to:

Easily deal with changes in business environment;

Redeploy equipment;

Spend in small increments as business conditions warrant vs. big up-front investments and overcapacity;

Deliver meaningfully differentiated QoS levels at meaningfully differentiated costs;

Transition to newer technologies in storage and servers without disruption to the business users; and

Appropriately match resources to the criticality of the business application.

Making storage virtualisation work for your business

Storage virtualisation has multiple advantages but it may not be the only solution or even the best solution to a specific problem that the particular enterprise is faced with. Enterprises need to be aware that many challenges can be addressed by a broad range of solutions available from various vendors, including virtualisation. Here are the broader issues that you should consider:

Compatibility — There is a potential for finger-pointing between vendors when interoperability errors occur between the virtualisation solution and the storage systems being pooled from multiple vendors. In the meantime your systems are down or data is corrupted. The highest standards of interoperability testing should be demanded before considering a solution.

Scalability — Storage virtualisation’s value comes from its ability to scale – maximum value is achieved when the whole target environment can be aggregated into a single logical view or “virtual pool”, enterprises need to make sure that the virtualisation solution that can do it without getting in the way.

Functionality — Enterprises should make sure that they use their existing investments in processes, skills, training and people that use these tools. Aside from cost, the “replacement” functionality must be benchmarked against the existing solutions.

Management — Virtualisation devices disrupt existing storage-resource management. If you have an environment with an end-to-end view of management, any virtualisation device will have to be re-integrated into it. Diagnosing problems can be hard and information from storage arrays, hosts and virtualisation systems must be combined, monitored and correlated to allow proper identification and remediation. The re-integration of the management view is essential to achieve the manageability benefits of a virtualized environment.

Support — Virtualisation devices add another layer of complexity – the virtualisation solution provider must now take responsibility for ensuring interoperability with everything behind the device.

If you are not already leveraging or planning on deploying some form of virtualisation technology to address your data and storage management challenges, the following questions will help you plan and be better equipped to sort out the various options.

Keep in mind the issues or challenges you are looking to address with virtualisation technology. For example, are you looking at volume, LUN or file system pooling and aggregation to improve capacity utilisation, enhance interoperability, reduce management complexity, reduce costs or eliminate real or perceived vendor lock-in?

Ask yourself if you need or simply want virtualisation technology. For example, you may want to have virtualisation to create a seamless transparent pool of unified storage to reduce costs and eliminate vendor lock-in. On the other hand, you may need virtualisation to enable transparent data migration and movement for tiered storage or to eliminate downtime caused by technology upgrades or disruptions from capacity movement and allocation.

How will virtualisation technology fit into your existing environment? Look at what procedural and configuration changes will be needed, along with training and education requirements. What other technologies will be required on host servers, including applications, agents, managers, drivers, shims, or other forms of software?

Does the storage virtualisation solution allow you to use the sophisticated capabilities of the pooled storage arrays for areas such as cloning/snapshots/replication, or does it disable or replace them? Will it scale in terms of number of storage devices and servers attached, overall capacity, performance (IOPS, bandwidth, latency) capabilities, ease of use and availability?

Future proofing

The costs of a storage virtualisation solution vary according to the amount of information that needs to be virtualised, for example, a typical EMC Invista system with 10TB (terabytes) of storage would cost around US$100,000. When talking about Return on Investment, according to a survey of 210 IT managers by Enterprise Strategy Group, early adopters of storage virtualisation technology have achieved average cost reductions of 24% in hardware, 16% in software, and 19% in SAN administration. Nearly all (96%) of the respondents expressed an interest in implementing storage virtualisation in the next 24 months.

Two Optimisation Tips

Firstly, run a server virtualisation assessment to identify under-utilized resources and determine which workloads are candidates for virtualisation and consolidation. This will give you valuable input for building a virtualisation business case.

Next, do a data classification assessment – it will identify areas for cost savings through storage tiering, help get capacity planning under control, streamline backups and define data management policies.

In conclusion, virtualisation technologies and solutions can have great benefits for almost any IT organisation regardless of size. Specific types of virtualisation solutions and technologies may have more relevance for different size environments. When it comes to virtualisation technology, start simple and evolve, understand your scaling issues, and keep in mind what the specific virtualisation technology is designed and intended to support. Realising that different solutions are targeted at various functions, and then aligning those capabilities to your needs, can be the key to a successful storage virtualisation technology deployment. Done correctly, virtualisation technology should be transparent and reduce your management activities and eliminate complexity.

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