Storage Virtualization? Almost no talks about it much thanks to the fact that technologies such as Cloud Computing took the majority of the share away for a long time now. We have already covered some on Storage Virtualization. It’s a complicated technology, which needs some getting used to, and it also needs specific expertise.
For one, it’s not the same as Cloud Storage. It’s a technology that replicates or abstracts the name of the data from the actual data. This becomes the metadata, which is then rendered searchable by applications. In essence, this technology now renders physical data less important (especially with respect to the location of the physical data). Literally, you could have the physical data anywhere as far as the metadata access points are known.
One area where Storage Virtualization comes incredibly useful is that it helps you to obviate the need to add more storage capacity to your enterprise storage provisions since it could sometimes lead to overprovision. Storage virtualization also allows you to improve your data integrity, simplifies your data back up considerably, and makes archival data also easily accessible. In addition, you can now deploy latency, and resolve security issues.
It isn’t as rosy a picture as it seems as Storage virtualization comes with its own complications. For instance, you’d lose all access to mission-critical or business critical data if the network connections were severed. As data transverses through the networks, it can be subjected to interception and be open to corruption.
Here’re the questions you should ask when you are about to implement Virtualization for storage:
- What is the minimum and maximum (Floor and Ceiling) amount of storage you’d need? How much of this should be rendered accessible online?
- What, if any, are your backup and archiving needs?
- What are, specifically, the applications that this virtualized data would store?
- What are your security requirements for this data? (You’ll have more need for this than you can imagine)
- How scalable should your needs for storage be?
Depending on how you answer these questions, your actual needs will be uncovered. For instance, if security surfaces as a predominant need for your business, you’d then have to consider a SAN (Storage Area Network). You’ll, more often than not, need servers that are able to run virtualization applications. Do you need backup and archival? You’ll then need to do additional configurations.
The key is to build a dynamic storage environment that can be scaled up and down and still remain user-friendly, cost-effective and highly efficient. If you fel that it’s a little too much to spend time on or if you’ve been looking for outside help of a consultant to help you with strategically implementing a Virtualized Storage Solution for your business, you could always reach out to us. Here, at Network Pro, we have established a winning expertise of helping clients set-up dynamic storage environment for their businesses.
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