 "Streamlining Tasks Easier With Storage Virtualisation")
In an interview with Biztech2.0 Vivekanand Venugopal, Products and Solutions, director, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems discusses about storage virtualisation.
How far will storage virtualisation be helpful to enterprises for consolidation of storage environments?
Storage virtualisation brings a new dimension to tasks such as archiving, back-up, recovery, making them simpler and faster. This technology has the ability to simplify storage administration, allocation and reallocation of resources and reduces the costs involved in managing different storage assets. IT heads don’t need to bother about details at the lower levels and can automate storage management functions with ease. Organisations can also achieve far greater business agility, align their storage infrastructure more closely with application requirements and can also react quickly to changing service-level requirements. It also allows for seamless migration of data between systems, which leads to situation where organisations do not have to shut systems down while performing upgrades or replicating data across varied systems.
Your suggestions to enterprises that are planning opt for storage virtualisation
It is true that when it comes to investing in storage management, it becomes the last option in the IT spending cycle. As the cost of manpower is increasing everyday, CIOs have no option but to invest in the automation of storage processes. Early adoption of storage virtualisation focuses on creating a larger pool of storage resources and increases the utilisation of this storage resource. Today, customers see the cost, performance, protection and management benefits of deploying tiered storage infrastructure that leverages heterogeneous storage assets and common storage services offered through virtual ports, logical partitioning, provisioning, mirroring, replication and volume migration.
Hitachi has also introduced a tiered storage manager that could automate the movement of data across tiers of storage based on policies triggered by time or events. First of all, enterprises need to recognise that virtualisation is not a point product, it is a critical part of their long term infrastructure strategy. So even though there are many significant tactical deployments that will drive significant short-term benefits, they need to understand how virtualisation fits in and enables their long term strategy.
What is the level of storage virtualisation awareness and adoption among Indian SMBs?
Storage virtualisation is recognised as one of the best ways for IT managers to streamline routine tasks like backup, archiving and recovery. Medium to large businesses have gained the benefit of quick restore time by implementing tiered storage solutions, where the backup is done on disk and then transferred for long term storage on tape. Similarly, we will see the adoption rate rising in India among the SMBs because of the cost saving benefits of this technology. Therefore from a cost effective perspective, ease of implementation and reduced risk storage virtualisation would be applicable to SMBs. The awareness level of virtualisation is very high, however adoption levels of storage virtualisation among SMBs is very low. This will not last for long. The transition to adopt storage technologies that provide tremendous cost savings will be adopted soon.