Virtualization is clearly having a major impact across the IT industry. Viewed broadly, virtualization involves decoupling workloads and data from the functional details of the physical devices on which they are hosted. In a nutshell Virtualization is the presentation of, a server, Operating Systems, applications, simple files, volumes or other storage object, presenting a virtual device.
Depending on the nature of the workloads being consolidated, many organizations routinely achieve server consolidation ratios as high as 15-to-1 or more using virtualization. Consolidating servers with virtualization enables administrators to reduce the number of physical machines, but rarely the data storage needs. With that said virtualization greatly reduces the physical devices that you have to maintain, acquire, manage, resulting in lower maintenance costs, fewer cooling requirements, less power consumption, and smaller hardware footprints in the datacenter.
To effectively leverage the capabilities of virtual infrastructures, storage must not only be network-accessible, maintain high performance rates, be highly available, and be easily scaled without affecting applications or limiting the performance as workloads change and grow. IceWEB’s INLINE storage products are easy to deploy, flexible to manage, and intrinsically reduces ongoing costs so that clients may truly reap the economic benefits of a virtualized environment.
Virtualization increases the flexibility with which the workloads and data can be matched properly to the physical resources; it enables administrators to develop business-driven policies for delivering resources that are appropriate given specific time, cost, and service-level requirements. As a result, virtualization enables IT operations to be performed with far better economies of scale, maximizing the utilization of existing resources in the short term, virtualization can solve some specific problems faced by IT managers today. Virtualization has already proven its ability to deliver several fundamental business benefits in a variety of environments.
Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical limitations so long as the data that it requires can be readily accessed. IceWEB’s storage solution facilitate arbitrarily sized virtual disks from a mixed storage pool to be un-intrusively added, moved and replicated without host modifications. Advanced services including caching, snapshots and remote mirroring enhance the properties of the virtualized environment providing, improved availability, performance and uniformity. The result is a scalable storage pool comprised of virtual disks that is available to the popular OS flavors, independent of vendor providing a more sophisticated storage network that is configured to ensure highly available access to the storage resources. IceWEB’s INLINE storage product not only works well in the virtualized environment, we see it as the future.
As it becomes more apparent that virtualization is here to stay, some users may find it intuitively appealing to standardize on a software platform that is optimized solely for virtualization. However, using established operating systems to virtualized workloads offers a variety of benefits related to compatibility, robustness, and functionality, security, and manageability issues such as patch management. ESX Server from VMware, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) from Novell, and Windows Server 2008 from Microsoft are all designed to host virtual infrastructure. However, some key differences in the implementations of these virtualization platforms can have a significant impact on their deployment requirements and manageability SO remember a few key topics:
- Virtualization is a valuable technique, and should not a technology or product.
- No wrong place, no one right place.
- Multiple levels are OK.
- Without reliable cost affective shared storage it never works well
- Virtualization is critical to next-generation storage monoliths.
IceWEB’s INLINE storage product provides several Key Benefits that supplement your Virtualization Strategy, most notably they:
Reduce storage-related TCO
- Reduced storage administration tasks
- Manage more with current staff
- Less expensive hardware
- Easier to manage
Expand storage without disrupting applications
- Dynamically provision storage among needy hosts on demand
- Eliminate downtime attributed to adding, replicating, reassigning, and upgrading storage
- Eliminate large % of planned server downtime
- Add, upgrade, reassign and replicate disks online
- Logical volumes behave just like directly-attached disks
Offer Scalability and high availability
- Eliminate business disruptions
- Scale the amount and class of storage needed
- Grow network infrastructure as needed
- Remove single points of failure
- Instant fail over
Deliver the highest performance
- There is no performance trade-off
- Scale performance as needed
- Maintain or exceed existing service levels
Have a higher application throughput and SAN performance
- Storage-related tasks offloaded from application hosts
- More responsive applications
|
