At this time of year, many of us are thinking about the achievements of events of the last 12 months, and looking forward to what the next will bring. As for me, I’m putting my money on 2011 being the year that we see the integration of virtual environments really take off.
At Hitachi Data Systems, we’re proud to be leading the world in storage virtualisation, a unique architecture that helps customers reduce cost and drive inefficiencies out of their storage environments.
However, storage virtualisation is different to server virtualisation – a concept that is probably more familiar to most, and whose operational benefits are now well recognised across the industry. Indeed, the continued success of VMware in this area is attracting more vendors to create virtualisation solutions, either to complement or compete with it, and this in turn creates value for users.
Can these virtual worlds of server and storage be combined to deliver even more value? Or are they two separate ways of delivering similar things that can’t deliver more than the sum of their parts? That’s the challenge we have been working on for some time – and, I’m pleased to say, with some success.
For example, the VMware vStorage API’s for Array Integration (VAAI) is a critical part of VMware’s strategy, and it acknowledges the need to bring compute and storage together as tightly as possible. But will any old storage do? Is ‘good enough’ acceptable? I work for Hitachi Data Systems so I am compelled to say no! The questions we at HDS have to answer is: How do we deliver more for VMware customers who see the value in technologies like VAAI?
We’ve worked with organisations in many different industries and all over the world to implement best practices and advanced techniques, like Dynamic Provisioning and balancing symmetric active-active controllers. It’s approaches like these that have enabled us to help our customers and partners make really compelling combinations of server and storage environments.
As we look ahead to 2011, I’m eager to see what new integration projects and successes we’ll be supporting.
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Vox: The EMEA Blog » Blog Archive » Happy New Year! on 04 Jan 2011 at 9:48 am
[...] and like me are looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that 2011 will bring. Seeing Chris Sweetapple’s comments predicting the dominance of virtualisation in the storage agenda this year, I thought I’d share [...]