File Virtualization

Hi, I'm Jack Norris. I'm director of Virtualization Marketing for EMC. And today I'm here to talk about file virtualization. Companies today are dealing with an exploding amount of unstructured data. And unstructured data are the non-data base types; files, documents, etc. And with storage administrators, they have to increase storage efficiency, basically manage more with less, while at the same time maintaining, if not increasing, service levels as companies move to 24x7. And this is definitely a tradeoff because increasing storage efficiency means moving data, moving data for cost reasons or capacity or to balance performance and when you move data it introduces downtime.

So how does file virtualization work? Well I've drawn a series of diagrams here. All the circles represent clients and users or applications and these green rectangles represent network storage devices or file servers. And today the way these are connected are through physical links. So end users have to know the physical path and where these files are stored. And for administrators, when these file servers fill up or you've got lower performance, they need to move the data across their environment and moving data is not simple. You need to take the data off line. You need to figure out which end users are using this data, coordinate with the end users and have this intense battle plan to figure out how to relocate this data with the least amount of disruption. And then once the data is relocated and users have to follow a new physical link to find the data, this results in disruption. It results in confusion.

With file virtualization it changes all that. File virtualization creates a logical pool so that end users have logical names not physical paths to access the data. And virtualization allows administrators to relocate data without disrupting the end user access. So with virtualization you increase SLA's you increase efficiency, you lower total costs in the organization. But all virtualization technologies are not the same. Some virtualization technologies require the deployment of a proprietary appliance or switch and all of the end users have to be reconfigured to access this point and this device then mounts all of the back end storage. This creates virtualization, you have a logical name to access this backend storage. However you have a single point of failure and a single point of bottleneck in accessing all of this data.

A better approach is with global file virtualization. And global file virtualization provides the virtualization benefits without some of these side effects. And how does it work? Well you have a global name space that basically updates and provides the logical view for end users. And then there's a switch that plugs into an industry standard network and relocates the data while filtering traffic so that all of the access is not through the virtualization appliance. So you get the benefits of virtualization as well as scalability.

So why virtualization? Dramatically increases storage efficiency. It increases service levels. It dramatically simplifies how administrators manage storage and as you look at file virtualization keep in mind that not all file virtualization solutions are created equal. And for administrators this allows them to manage more with less and allows them to eliminate late night and weekend migrations.