In the New Wild West of Storage, the Virt Admin is Sheriff

April 22, 2015 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from VMblog.   Author: Michael Thompson

Virtualization and storage have always been tightly bound. After all, keeping both in sync is critical for VM and ultimately application performance. A key difference these days is that while there is still some change happening in the virtualization space with new capabilities like those in VMware vSphere 6 or what’s expected in the next Windows Server Hyper-V release, overall, the virtualization landscape is relatively calm. Storage, on the other hand, is in the middle of an upheaval like we haven’t seen since the days when SAN and NAS technology were new.

In fact, storage is the new Wild West of the technology landscape, with a flood of new vendors and technology vying for companies’ IT dollars. From virtual storage to all flash drives to auto-tiering across storage drive types to hyperconverged systems, storage innovation is all the rage. I recently attended a couple VMUG events, including those in Austin and Silicon Valley, and my unscientific poll indicated that at least one-third of the vendors in the expo areas were pitching something to do with storage (I’m including the hyperconvergence vendors).
 

But while storage is the focus of many of these efforts, virtualization is really the catalyst of the advances-the performance demands of virtualization, especially in terms of IOPs demand, are the driving force for storage innovation. So, just like the Wild West when all the cowboys (i.e., new storage technologies) would ride into town on a Friday night to cause havoc and chaos, a sheriff (i.e., the virtualization admin) is needed to make sure everyone plays nicely together.

As that sheriff, here are some things you need to know.

Read the entire article at the source: http://vmblog.com/archive/2015/04/22/in-the-new-wild-west-of-storage-the-virt-admin-is-sheriff.aspx#.VTeLyZMsAQA