It is a rare mantelpiece that does not have at least one
photograph of a wedding, graduation or family gathering. So when
Fotango.com launched a service allowing customers to store
photographs of important events online, the company knew the
biggest challenges would be meeting demand and offering total
reliability.
"If you are storing pictures of really important events in people's
lives, like weddings, you cannot afford to lose a single image, and
people expect to be able to access their images instantly," says
Simon Wardley, Fotango's chief operating officer. "That is the same
whether they are accessing their holiday snaps or images of a big
event like Live8."
The challenge for Fotango was to create a storage infrastructure
that would provide reliable access to several terabytes of image
data, without spending a fortune on storage hardware. The firm also
wanted to be able to move data around so that if demand for some
images suddenly spiked, those images could be placed on a storage
medium that would provide faster, high-performance access.
After a three-month consultation process, Fotango invested in
storage virtualisation technology from IBM that allows IT staff to
view all available storage as a single pool and move data easily
between storage platforms.
"With virtualisation, we can add capacity easily where we need it,
and reprioritise high-performance hardware when necessary," says
Wardley. "We have very high volumes of data and high rates of
change, but virtualisation still means we can make the very best
use of our resources."
Many enterprises are also struggling to tame the storage monster,
says Bob Zimmerman, an analyst with Forrester Research.
"As inexpensive as storage may be, the volume of corporate data is
still increasing by about 40% a year," says Zimmerman. "Ultimately,
the cost of storage hardware, access and management will outweigh
the savings you are making from disc price erosion."
Storage management is also an issue because few companies work in a
single-supplier datacentre, says Paul Griffiths, technical
marketing manager at storage supplier Brocade.
"In most enterprise datacentres there will be some legacy mainframe
storage and you may have a mixture of Unix and Wintel servers from
various suppliers," he says. "That is because most companies have
chosen their hardware for technology or financial reasons, rather
than ease of management."
This complexity can dramatically increase the cost of storage
management and, in some cases, mean that management is not even
attempted, says Simon Pennock, managing director of The Networked
Storage Company, an independent storage consulting firm.
"It is a big headache because each point solution has its own
management tools and its own training requirements," he says. In
many cases, companies do not have time to implement the various
management systems and end up managing storage manually. "An awful
lot of spreadsheets are being used to manage storage in enterprises
today," says Pennock.
Storage virtualisation helps companies address these problems
because it allows IT departments to present heterogeneous storage
hardware from multiple suppliers as a single pool of storage.
The first important advantage of this is that companies no longer
need to individually manage a dozen different hardware platforms.
Instead, they use a single interface to control the entire storage
pool.
Secondly, virtualisation can help companies increase the efficiency
of their existing storage systems by increasing utilisation.
"With storage virtualisation, you can pool all your storage and
parcel it out to applications and servers that need it, as
required," says Guy Bunker, senior director, software engineering
at supplier Veritas. "Not only does this mean better utilisation,
but we are also seeing block-level back-ups and intelligent
replication across storage networks, which would be impossible
without virtualisation."
"It is not unusual for companies to only use 20% or 30% of the
capacity on some of their storage hardware," says Lawrence James,
information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions business manager
at supplier StorageTek. "With virtualisation, you are presented
with an image of the entire pool, with all the spare capacity
pooled together, so you can see utilisation rates of 80% or 90%
quite easily."
Better utilisation means companies can wait longer before buying
new hardware, generating big savings. One high street bank that
implemented virtualisation technology saved 20m in storage hardware
and associated costs over three years, says James.
Finally, virtualisation can reduce complexity, allowing many
routine storage maintenance tasks to be simplified or automated.
"One of the biggest benefits of virtualisation is that it removes
the need to individually manage and control a dozen different
mainframe, Wintel and Unix storage servers," says James. "For many
of our customers, using virtualisation means that staff no longer
have to come in at weekends to manage the servers."
Virtualisation is not a particularly new idea, but the technology
has advanced enormously in the past couple of years, says Claus
Egge, programme director at analyst firm IDC.
"The concept of having a virtualisation layer between storage
hardware and applications has been around for years, but whereas it
used to focus on what was happening in the storage array, now it
can operate at a network level across various platforms and
environments," says Egge.
Companies can choose from a range of virtualisation technologies,
which operate at a hardware, software or appliance level (see box).
Each approach has pros and cons, so it is important that users
consider what they want to achieve before investing in any new
technology, says Egge.
Forrester recommends that companies with large datacentres
implement virtualised storage on a fabric-based model, but this
approach is not suitable where companies are consolidating a large
number of homogenous arrays. For this an array-based model would be
better, says Zimmerman.
In some cases, enterprises may be wise to wait for anticipated
developments in silicon, which should make virtualisation easier in
heterogeneous environments. Intel and AMD are both adding new
capabilities to processors that will make it easier to run multiple
operating systems on a single platform. Intel, for example, plans
to add virtualisation technology to its Pentium line from the end
of 2005, and to its Itanium and Xeon lines in 2006.
Some analysts say the latest virtualisation technology could enable
companies to implement ILM, another hot topic for IT directors.
"ILM would be practically impossible for most companies without
virtualisation," says Egge. "However, with virtualisation becoming
more mainstream, we expect to see a lot of companies also rolling
out ILM projects."
ILM is based on the idea that the value of information (and
therefore data) varies over time, explains Bunker. The most
valuable data should be stored on fast/expensive disc storage and
less valuable data moved to near-line CD/DVD storage or tape, and
ultimately archived. "With virtualisation, this process can be
completely automated based on administrator-set policies," says
Bunker.
Certainly, early adopters of storage virtualisation have reported
impressive results. According to research by the US-based
Enterprise Strategy Group, virtualisation delivers average cost
reductions of 24% in hardware, 16% in software and 19% in San
administration.
Today, about 30% of StorageTek's enterprise customers are looking
at virtualisation, says James, and many have already deployed the
technology. "I expect that to grow further," he adds. "Many of our
customers could expect to reduce storage management costs by a
factor of 10 if they use virtualisation."