Virtualization of IT systems decouples physical infrastructure from logical resources, hiding complexity and enabling new capabilities. However, not all potential benefits of virtualization have meaningful value outside IT circles: Too many of our discussions revolve around the very complexity that virtualization technology should be hiding! True business value is derived from transformed virtual resources in the next-generation data center, not the incremental capacity gains of virtual servers. But how will we get there, and what will this future look like?
storage virtualization
Granularity: The Hidden Challenge of Storage Management
Many storage challenges focus on the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.
Thin Provisioning: Playing the Telephone Game
What happens in the telephone game is that a little bit of information gets lost at each step along the path, and at the end of the chain you’ve basically lost all the information. And this happens all the time in computers, especially in data storage. Thin reclamation is the core technical challenge to thin provisioning, and the telephone game is the reason.
The Truth About HP’s Tech Day
HP and Ivy did a darn fine job of putting together a set of sessions to tell us what they have. They presented folks who really knew their stuff, warts and all. They invited a variety of independent voices and let us ask and say anything we wanted with no expectations, let alone an NDA. This was a stellar event, and every other IT company should be asking why they didn’t do it first.
Storage Utilization Remains at 2001 Levels: Low!
I’ve been talking about storage capacity utilization for my entire career, but the storage industry doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Every year or so, a new study is performed showing that half of storage capacity in the data center is unused. And every time there is a predictable (and poorly thought through) “networked storage is […]
