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Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

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You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Storage Virtualization: What Is It Good For?

Storage Virtualization: What Is It Good For?

June 17, 2008 By Stephen 4 Comments

Even though storage virtualization technologies have been on the market for 20 years or more, and numerous companies have tried to sell it as a product in its own right for at least half that long, many are still unsure of what to do with the technology.  A great new piece by Dave Raffo, News Director at SearchStorage.com, discusses the wide variety of virtualization solutions and the real impact they can have.

Dave called me for this piece, and I was pleased with the question.  Truth be told, there really are compelling benefits from virtualization, but most folks have been waiting for a real “must have” killer application for the technology.  In order for this tech to make the impact it should, we in the industry have to change some of our thinking:

  • Storage virtualization means more than just Fibre Channel block aggregation.  There are great applications inside servers and arrays and in the NAS world, too.
  • Speaking of NAS, Microsoft DFS is probably the most-implemented storage virtualization product, and just about every NAS array has cool aggregation and migration features.
  • Virtualization is a feature, not a product.  HDS has seen the amazing potential for block virtualization in migration and storage flexibility, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Storage and server virtualization go well together – so well, in fact, that ESG reports that 24% of those who have implemented the latter are also using the former!
Update: This post was apparently picked up and translated into Chinese by IT168.com.
If you’re interested in storage virtualization, why not come on out for one of my seminars on the topic?  I’ll be in Atlanta and San Francisco next week, and I think spots are still available.  I’ll be in other cities, including London (where I’ll surely change the spelling to “virtualisation”) later in the year.  Or you can catch my one-hour session at Storage Decisions in San Francisco or New York.  See you there!

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Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Personal Tagged With: DFS, ESG, Fibre Channel, HDS, Microsoft, NAS, nas storage, network attached storage, network storage, SearchStorage, seminar, Storage Decisions, storage virtualization, TechTarget, toot toot

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