Storage virtualisation will be a helpful tool for enterprises to consolidate their storage environments. 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, 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 of ownership.

According to an IDC report, India's spending on storage backup and recovery solutions is increasing due to demand from additional storage capacity generated by new-generation applications, and also thanks to concerns about disaster recovery and business continuity. Virtualisation that's not driven by a brand but by the technology facilitates consolidation of data without the need to use separate tape drives for different backups. Customers could see a 50 percent reduction in cost with virtualisation.

From Forrester's annual data centre survey of more than 1,000 firms in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific, it is learned that about 20 percent of enterprises report using some form of storage virtualisation already, with Global 2000 firms and companies in industries with complex data needs being much more likely to have adopted it. By 2008, about half of the enterprises expect to deploy storage virtualisation. Today, only 19 percent of enterprises have deployed storage virtualisation solutions, but soon 85-90 percent of enterprises will be using some form of virtualised storage to take full advantage of SAN technology. And in the coming years, storage virtualisation will become a crucial factor in driving a company's choice of storage vendor. The overall market for storage and server virtualisation worldwide is expected to surpass $15 billion by 2009.

Managing storage infrastructure efficiently

In today's business environment, organisations need to optimise their resource utilisation and create a centralised management for their IT infrastructure in order to comply with regulatory guidelines and compete in the global marketplace. The biggest issue in consolidation is the issue of downtime when consolidating information or technology, which is in production. No customer likes taking production systems down, especially when there's even the smallest degree of uncertainty about how long the system may be down.

Says Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec India and SAARC, "The answer to all these issues lies in consolidating existing storage systems into manageable storage architecture. Storage consolidation offers flexible and centrally managed storage that can be distributed to provide the performance and availability demanded by applications. It lets organisations manage growth, control security and information access, and provide rapid response to changing business demands."

Virtualisation also promises to enhance overall platform independence, along with system flexibility and utilisation. Maximising system flexibility and utilisation are critical to ensuring that a storage investment delivers the benefits and dividends its owners expect. 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.

Technology consolidation allows customers to consolidate multiple storage platforms and networks into a single infrastructure to increase utilisation and lower costs, as well as meet a wide range of service level requirements. Information consolidation helps customers effectively manage information and fixed content with lower costs, while operational consolidation helps customers simplify complexity and provide automation and standardisation across the storage infrastructure.

Awareness and adoption rate among SMBs

Storage virtualisation is yet to pick up in a big way in India. Most Indian enterprises are either not using it or are planning to use it at a later stage. Says Ajaz Munsiff, director, Products and Solutions, EMC Asia Pacific, "Companies that have large, diverse and complex environments and are looking to simplify the management of these environments are good candidates for implementing virtualisation. But it’s certainly not confined to these verticals. Keeping in mind the increased spending on IT by the SMB segment, it’s apparent that virtualisation will catch up among the SMB segment as well."

Though awareness levels of virtualisation is very high, adoption levels of storage virtualisation by SMBs is very low. This will change; the transition to adopt storage technologies that provide tremendous cost savings will be adopted. Storage virtualisation is recognised as one of the best ways for IT managers to streamline routine tasks such as backup, archiving and recovery. Says Jim Simon, director, Marketing, APAC, Quantum, "In recent years, the biggest impact of technological advancement on data protection has been the dramatic reduction in the cost of ATA disk arrays. Medium to large businesses have gained the benefit of quick restore times by implementing tiered storage solutions, where the backup is done to disks and then transferred to longer-term storage on tape. Similarly, we will see the adoption rate rising in India among SMBs because of the cost-saving benefits."

A word to the CIO

Early adoption of storage virtualisation has focused on creating a larger pool of storage resources and increased the utilisation of this resource. Today customers see the cost, performance, protection and management benefits of deploying tiered storage infrastructures that leverage heterogeneous storage assets and common storage services offered through virtual ports, logical partitioning, provisioning, mirroring, replication and volume migration. Says Vivekanand Venugopal, director, Products and Solutions, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems, "Storage virtualisation brings a new dimension to tasks such as archiving, backup and recovery, making them simpler and faster. The technology has the ability to simplify storage administration, allocation and reallocation of resources, and reduces the costs involved in managing different storage assets. IT heads need not bother about details at the lower levels and can automate storage management functions."

Though storage virtualisation has multiple advantages, it may not be the only solution or even the best solution to a specific problem that an enterprise faces. Enterprises need to be aware that many challenges can be addressed by a broad range of solutions available from various vendors, including virtualisation. Suggests Munsiff, "First of all, enterprises need to recognise that virtualisation is not a point product, it's a critical part of their long-term infrastructure strategy. So even though there are many significant tactical deployments that will drive significant short-term benefits, they need to understand how virtualisation fits into and enables their long-term strategy."