Storage virtualization is ready but adoption is slow, Says IDC

IDC's end-user survey across the Asia/Pacific (excluding) Japan region in 2007 has identified the key issues that organizations face in planning their storage infrastructure (see figure below). Security, disaster recovery, capacity, compliance and disk utilization have been listed as some of the top issues. In addition, all IT managers mentioned the need to reduce operating and storage management costs.

“Virtualization is a technology that is believed to reduce complexity and cost, improve utilization levels and help control the server and storage sprawling within enterprises. However, while we have seen a lot of interest and excitement in the server virtualization world, that same enthusiasm has been slower to appear in the storage side,” says Graham Penn, Associate Vice President of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Storage.

Today's typical data centre houses equipment from many large yet independent server and storage systems. There are also servers running a variety of operating systems with some storage attached. Many of these servers run a single application, and in some cases, these have been built into distinct and separate silos, resulting in hundreds and sometimes thousands of these silos in the data centre of today's larger enterprises. This proliferation has introduced considerable physical complexity and made the management of devices and data very difficult for IT Managers.

The solution to this complexity is to introduce virtualization technology at the server, networking, and the storage layer within the infrastructure fabric. In time, some of the applications & clients accessing information can be virtualized as well. This is expected to occur over the next 2-4 years so that a "utility capability" becomes available, eliminating silos. The goal is to enable easy management of the overall environment so as to provide better access to information and to have applications delivered as if they were a utility at a level of performance that the users have requested.

More insights about storage virtualization will be revealed at IDC’s upcoming Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference 2007. By viewing virtualization as an abstraction layer put on top of a large number of physical storage devices, IDC analysts and industry experts will demonstrate how the massive proliferation of physical storage devices, arrays and JBODS (Just a bunch of Disks) all over the enterprise can be combined for ease of management. Storage virtualization can hide the idiosyncrasies of each physical storage system and provide a common way of dealing with all of the disparate devices, significantly easing storage management.

“By adding storage virtualization on top of the heterogeneous storage systems, IT managers can provide a consistent interface for all storage applications, enabling a single set of storage applications, rather than multiple applications, supporting the same functions. This is also true for tasks like data migration and consolidation, making these otherwise disruptive tasks far less disruptive to the storage enterprise,” Graham concludes.

About IDC’s Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference 2007
IDC's Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference 2007 will be rolled out across 10 cities in the Asia/Pacific region from November 2007. Themed "Reinventing the Datacenter-Where to begin?", industry experts will share strategic insights on the innovation, trends and threats around the next-generation datacenters for organizations to develop a viable, intelligent and agile IT infrastructure, while aligning with key business objectives . For more information, please refer to http://www.idc.com.sg/infravision2007/default.asp. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Ryan Solomon at rsolomon@idc.com.

IDC