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09-02-2012 - Numbers don’t lie
I have been going through my annual ritual of checking all of the published statistics from industry ...
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Jon Toigo  |
 |
Jon William Toigo is directeur en eigenaar van Toigo Partners
en voorzitter van The Data management Institute LLC. |
14 maart 2011 - Titanic
Hate to say it, but I told you so. According to several surveys that have been dumped on my desk over the past few weeks, it appears that a disproportionate number of server virtualization projects have stalled when they were less than 20 per cent complete. The problem is simple and consistent: filled with the hype of the hypervisor vendors, planners leapt into the virtual abyss before they looked at the real costs associated with the strategy.
We were told that all this virtualization thing would cost was a basic hypervisor software license, a cost readily offset by reductions in the numbers of physical servers and their associated labor and energy expense. Then it became evident that we needed the other licenses—those providing all of the cool features that were described in the brochure, but not included on the Dell, HP or other server we bought. Then we needed to get our staff trained as vSphere engineers or something, an additional expense. Then we discovered that consolidating all of those guests onto fewer servers required significant changes to our network cable infrastructure and, ultimately, to our storage infrastructure.
Storage is the big part of the cost iceberg, submerged beneath the waterline of our virtualization vision, out of view and ready to sink our most unsinkable project plans. When the costs of reinventing storage became evident, especially the requirement to ‘forklift upgrade’ our Fibre Channel fabrics, the captain called a full stop to our virtualization journey. In the aftermath, there was much hand-wringing, wailing and gnashing of teeth as the reality of virtualization collided with the business case. The story probably won’t stop here, of course. Most firms are hiring consultants and pouring over their budgets to determine what can be salvaged to realize the gains of server and, afterwards, desktop virtualization, without becoming the next James Cameron epic in the process.
SANsymphony-V
But there seems to be at least one way of doing it right: DataCore’s storage virtualization technology that goes by the unassuming name of SANsymphony-V. The company already enjoys a broad install base in Europe, where firms seemed to cling to the idea of abstracting software from array controllers as a cost containment measure years before it caught on in the US market. SANsymphony-V is more than a new version of a DataCore product, it is a comprehensive reworking of both the underlying platform and the presentation layer that has succeeded in elevating the product from nice-to-have to must-have status, especially for companies confronting the big stall in their server and desktop virtualization projects.
The original case for storage virtualization remains just as valid and compelling as ever. SANsymphony-V enables you to pool your storage rigs, then serve up volumes to any application that requires them. The interface for allocating volumes is much improved: wizard-driven and resembling the latest Microsoft Office GUI more than anything else. You’ll see your storage and servers playfully represented as icons on the screen and simply drag the volumes onto the servers or guest machines to establish the connection between them. Since all I/O is serviced from a cache memory layer, storage response is three to five times faster. Moreover, SANsymphony-V remembers I/O paths and traffic is load-balanced across available connections automatically.
Thin provisioning is provided to ease the burden of capacity management. Logical volumes reflect maximum available capacity or any capacity you choose, but actual resources aren’t provided from the storage pool until they are needed. That’s across all disks in the pool, not just a stand of spindles attached to a proprietary array controller featuring thin provisioning software. Big difference that, both in terms of efficacy and cost.
Lifeboats
Data protection services are also universal. If you want continuous data protection in the form of write-logging to protect against a data corruption event, simply tick a box next to an allocated virtual volume. You’ll get granular log of writes that you can rewind to the moment before a corruption event has occurred and back out any bad data.
DataCore also saves sinking virtualization projects by delivering the means to synchronously replicate guest machine data behind any host server, which solves the problem of hypervisor clusters that share nothing… except storage. And you don’t need to wait until your storage vendor gets around to supporting the new APIs from the hypervisor vendor, such as the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The primitives for offloading functions like replication are built in to the volumes you provision via SANsymphony-V.
Of course DataCore continues to provide synchronous mirroring and snapshots to protect against localized equipment or facility disasters. The key difference is that their mirrors and snaps can be done amongst and between any hardware, regardless of brand! This means that if all else fails, you can always run for the lifeboats—and this time there will actually be enough of them.
22-02-2012 - Europees MKB benut opslagcapaciteit onvoldoendeVan alle kleine Europese bedrijven met 100 of minder werknemers heeft slechts 2 procent alle bedrijfstoepassingen naar de cloud gemigreerd. 85 procent heeft bedenkingen over een dergelijke stap. Dit blijkt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van Dell en Intel.
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