The Value of Storage Virtualization With New vSphere 5 Features
by Hu Yoshida on Jul 15, 2011
Last month, I was invited to speak to the St. Louis Super Computer Group, by Gary Stiehr, who is the founder of this user group and the Information Systems Group leader at The Genome Institute at Washington University in St Louis. Hitachi Data Systems and our partner Enterprise Consulting Group were sponsors of this event.
On the agenda with me was Rob Pegler, who spoke on Big Data. Rob is a great speaker so it is always enjoyable to hear his presentations. I remember Rob for his generous contributions to SNIA tutorials and for his work in developing the definition for storage virtualization, which was adopted by SNIA. Unlike the typical definitions that were developed by many other organizations, the SNIA definition has two parts.
1. [Storage System] The act of abstracting, hiding, or isolating the internal function of a storage (sub) system or service from applications, compute servers or general network resources for the purpose of enabling application and network independent management of storage or data.
2. [Storage System] The application of virtualization to storage services or devices for the purpose of aggregating, hiding complexity or adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources.
While most people have focused on the first part of this definition, I think the real value is in the second part of that definition; the ability for “adding new capabilities to lower level storage resources”.
This was highlighted again this week with the announcement of vSphere 5, which took the integration of server and storage virtualization to a new level.
With our approach to storage virtualization, we can extend the benefits of VAAI, VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 to storage systems that are virtualized behind Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. In this way, we can add new capabilities to lower level storage resources.
For more on our perspective on the implications for vSphere 5, please view Michael Heffernan’s video below.
Comments (1)
Hu Yoshida >> Blog Archive >> vSphere 5.0 - Optimized storage efficiency (VAAI phase 2) on 27 Jul 2011 at 12:56 pm
[...] 12, we blogged about the vSphere V5 announcement. In my last post, I talked about the ability of storage virtualization to add new capabilities, like the support of vSphere, to lower level resources. Today, Michael Heffernan is back to explain [...]
