The New Virtues of Virtualization
By Masha Zager
After being sidelined for years by low-cost PCs and servers, the virtues of virtualization are re-emerging. Its adoption is accelerating among companies of all sizes. "The world will be virtualized in several years," says Sal Capizzi, senior analyst at the Boston, Mass. based Yankee Group. "In five years, they'll be doing things you wouldn't even think about today."
The most immediate benefit for administrators is simplified storage management. Virtualization storage software lets administrators manage disk arrays of different types from different manufacturers and scattered in different locations as if they were a single pool of hard disks. This makes daily tasks, like allocating the correct amount of storage to any particular application, a straightforward operation rather than a complex calculation.
Virtualization also streamlines as well as simplifies storage management. Because applications are no longer mapped to specific physical storage devices, disk space doesn't need to be held in reserve for them. This load balancing improves application performance and allows disk space to be used more efficiently.
A less-visible but equally significant advantage: storage virtualization eliminates application downtime. Many tasks that once required applications to be brought down -- swapping out servers whose leases have expired, archiving data, performing backups -- can now be executed without any impact on the application.
More Space for More Storage Functions
Storage managers may find that virtualization increases their choices of disk hardware. Managing a heterogeneous storage environment becomes much simpler in a virtualized environment, where applications no longer interface directly with storage devices. "It wouldn't matter what the hardware is; the application wouldn't worry about that," says Capizzi. Managers are freer to mix and match hardware from different vendors, and to substitute lower-cost for higher-cost disk hardware. (article continues)
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