Enabling a virtualized world

I'm Claus Mikkelsen, Chief Scientist for Hitachi Data Systems and we're here today to talk about enabling a virtualized world. Now, what do we mean by that? Well, we're talking about storage virtualization here, and let me draw a typical configuration that you might see in a large data center. You will have many, many servers or hosts. Those servers will be attached typically to a SAN, a Storage Area Network and that Storage Area Network will be attached to one or more arrays. And we will call these arrays from Vendors X, Y and Z.

Now, the problem is that storage typically is very difficult to manage and if you have different vendor storage on your data center floor each of those vendors will have a different set of commands and APIs and management interfaces to manage the storage on those arrays. So what virtualization does is it gives you the ability to manage all of these heterogeneous arrays as if it was one large pool of storage with one set of interfaces and one set of commands.

So for example, you may have Oracle applications sitting up here. You may have an SAP application sitting on this host. You may have many other applications sitting on this host. If they and the storage administration activities have to deal with multiple vendors storage-in other words, a heterogeneous environment down here-that makes it difficult. If it has to manage and deal with one large pool of homogenous storage, suddenly the processes become much simpler.

Now, there are different ways to do virtualization. You can install virtualization software on each of the three hosts or hundreds of hosts, depending on what you have. This is called Server Based Virtualization. You can install appliances or intelligence switches within the storage area network fabric. This is called Network Based Virtualization. Or you can install an intelligent storage array that does virtualization at the array level and you can insert and plug in heterogeneous storage into this array, and this is called Array Based Virtualization.

Now, once you have that then you can do a lot of things to improve your overall business stature. One of the demands these days, through compliancy, government regulation or just good business practices is to contain a copy of critical data at a remote location so that if you lost your primary data center you can recover at this remote location. Enabling a virtualized world once we have that makes this much easier because now you can have data spread over heterogeneous storage arrays treated as if it was one large pool from the same vendor and do the replication to the remote site much more simply and easily than you can today.

Now, what are the benefits of virtualization? You can take the complexity and reduce it dramatically because you're managing one large pool as opposed to separate individual arrays. So complexity goes down, total cost of ownership. This is something everybody is concerned about, TCO. TCO improves because you've got one thing to manage as opposed to many things to manage. You've got one set of licenses to enable, for example, replication, instead of many. So the overall TCO can improve dramatically.

Headcount: There has been an estimate that it takes about one administrator to manage 10 terabytes of storage. We would expect with virtualization, what's it's enabled, that that one headcount can now manage 30, perhaps 50, perhaps 100 terabytes or more with one additional headcount.

So now you've seen the three different ways that we can enable virtualization in the server, the network and the array. You've seen the benefits of virtualization to your organization and hopefully now you can see how this whole thing ties in to your business practices.