Virtualization

Continuing from my post last week, The Data Conundrum:

Today’s Retailers are awash in high-volume, high-velocity data coming at them from all sides and Retail organizations are now shifting their focus from holding back the data deluge to accepting and even encouraging it as they develop ever-more-sophisticated and mission-critical capabilities. This new reality dictates that data management is a key business requisite.

Data has become the new currency for retailers, their most critical asset however retailers have been more reactive than proactive in managing this asset. The results of which have led to blind additions of capacity, data trapped in storage silos, duplicate data, extended refresh cycles, and ad hoc cloud usage that leads to dead-ends and the need to buy more storage. And data is not getting cheaper at the same rate that more data is being collected – A vicious cycle.

While data volumes are growing, the budgets required to support these escalating volumes must also grow…and the availability of increased IT budgets is far from uniform or sufficient. The outcome of this vicious-infrastructural-circle is that retailers have to find ways to be more efficient with the resources they have or change the way they deploy and manage them. That’s really what the whole point is: The IT world is having to adopt a different way to think; it is about data specifically rather than storage generically.

Irrespective of this shift in thinking, traditional infrastructures can no longer keep up. As a result, un-sharable storage silos, error-prone manual labor processes, and low storage availability are necessarily headed for the proverbial dustbin of IT history.

It’s time for a storage strategy and the first step is to look at options that might help  ‘trick-out’ your current investment into a strategy that will take you well into the future.

The best approach to efficient data management is implementing an advanced, data-driven infrastructure that includes such capabilities as automated tiering, automated migration, starting with virtualization on the high end, and adding somewhat less sophisticated products featuring compression and deduplication features on the low end.

So, what is Virtualization?

Virtualization – the ability to aggregate previously siloed and disconnected storage devices into a large virtual pool of storage that is managed from a single interface and that offers advanced functionality and performance not previously available

This capability is a critical prerequisite component for optimizing data management inasmuch as it is the foundational element that enables the creation of storage pools that can be accessed as needed across the infrastructure. The best virtualization will embrace and control a variety of heterogeneous storage devices, even those from a range of vendors. This maximizes the range of tools for each data job. No hammer looking for homogeneous nails here!

Uptime can be another major benefit of a good virtualized storage environment, and it is achieved in two main ways: through continuous operations, or via non-disruptive migrations. With continuous operations, as new applications are rolled out, and new storage capacity or a new storage tier is brought online—there need not be any downtime. In the case of non-disruptive migrations, as data is migrated to new storage systems or technologies downtime can again be avoided.

The first step in introducing changes to the way people work is getting them to think differently—and openly—about new environments and how they can improve the success of their business. With data pouring into businesses from an army of mobile devices, new applications, and virtualized servers, the need to manage primary data, backup data, and other legitimate copies of required data has never been greater. The world is changing dramatically, and data management is a key business requisite to the success of that transition. Helping line of business managers to mine the wealth of their data treasure troves is the new IT reality.

Storage can no longer be just a commodity in future IT infrastructures. Data management is now driving storage, and the storage world (infrastructure vendors and users alike) must respond with the right products and tools to efficiently support and exploit that data, to both operational and financial advantage. The goal is more favorable technologies that will not depend so heavily on increasing hardware footprints, but will leverage automation and other sophisticated tools for greater efficiencies.

Your strategy does not end with Virtualization, it begins there. Next, in this series, we will be addressing Compression and De-Duplication and Flash.