Eliminate Storage Headaches: Virtualize

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: George Crump.

he primary objective of virtualization and cloud computing is to create a data center that is more responsive to the needs of the business, that enables technology to be a competitive weapon instead of a cost center. Storage has to play a key role in this evolution so it can support these Agile IT initiatives.

In our upcoming webinar 3 Ways To Use The Cloud To Eliminate Storage Headaches, we are going to discuss how to eliminate storage administrative headaches like provisioning, performance management, storage expansion, and data protection. The key to eliminating these headaches is to create a storage value infrastructure which has three steps: virtualize the storage, automate the storage, and cloud-extend the storage. This first column will be devoted to storage virtualization, and we’ll cover the other two steps in our next column…

Storage virtualization can take two forms. First, the storage administrative processes like provisioning, LUN creation, and RAID configuration can be virtualized as part of the storage system so that you are not dealing with individual hard disk spindles. Provisioning tasks are one of the storage management headaches, and virtualization eliminates them for the most part. Virtualization allows for storage administrators or application owners to simply "dial in" the amount of capacity they need and assign that capacity to a host or virtual machine. The storage software takes care of the rest in the background…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/eliminate-storage-headaches-virtualize/240007542