Falconstor Community

Sometimes, the best way to determine which of two options is preferable is to look at them side by side.  Trying to decide between a Honda and a Toyota?  Compare them directly on fuel efficiency, price, and reliability.  Not sure which menu items at your favorite restaurant are healthiest?  Evaluate them both in terms of calories, fat content, and sodium.  Wondering whether storage virtualization with really transform your data center?  Read The Aberdeen Group’s latest report on companies that deploy storage virtualization versus those who do not.

 

In a recent piece in the July issue Virtual Strategy Magazine, Aberdeen Senior Research Analyst Richard Csaplar shares the highlights of a recent study exploring the main reasons enterprises are adopting storage virtualization, the primary benefits they’re realizing by doing so, and the evidence that these companies are assuming leadership roles in data center transformation.

 

Csaplar notes that the combined pressures of increasing storage demands, lengthy backup and restore times, and dwindling space in the data center are moving organizations toward storage virtualization – and that these companies are the ones most savvy about virtualization in general.  Csaplar writes, “Companies with virtualized storage show a wider range of virtualization projects across the organization than those with no storage virtualization. They are more likely to have server virtualization (95%), purchase servers optimized for virtualization (74%), have a converged network (49%), and have virtualized their desktops (35%). These organizations are clearly familiar with virtualization technologies and understand the benefits of deploying it.

 

Companies in the Aberdeen study and in practically every industry are seeking out more efficient business processes.  They have to.  The proliferation of data across the enterprise has become so extreme, they can no longer ignore the pressure to change the way they handle that data.  Nobody wants to get stuck managing separate islands of storage in the data center.  The most dedicated, hard-working, knowledgeable data center managers will buckle under the complexity of such a scenario, which requires independent management and protection policies and leads to resources that are either under- or over-utilized.

 

So, storage virtualization is becoming an attractive option for numerous enterprises.   The Aberdeen study shows that the most skilled companies are leading the way.  The study illustrates that the adoption of storage virtualization is not a random or impulsive move by inexperienced businesses.  It is increasingly embraced by those who have achieved success in other parts of their infrastructure through the benefits of virtual technologies.  Csaplar writes that deploying virtualized storage leads to significant benefits, including reduced strain of managing storage area network (SAN) devices, reduced number of SANs, and reduced time to deploy new servers.

 

And storage virtualization reduces something else too – cost.  Our customers report that virtualizing their storage devices and servers saves them about half a million dollars a year.  It doesn’t take a careful comparison to realize that kind of savings is a good choice.

Poor Juliet Capulet.  She asked, “What’s in a name?” And she answered her own question, “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  But she was a foolish teenager, a girl who made lots of wrong assumptions on her way toward fulfilling her destiny as a “star-crossed lover.”  Pardon the Shakespeare tangent away from technology; I did take some liberal arts classes in undergrad. (Way back then, Engineering, Math and Physics classes averaged 0.5068 girls per class)
A name, of course, matters quite a bit.  The term we use to describe anything – a person, a phenomenon, a technology – influences our understanding of that item’s purpose and significance.  This rings true in the data center, as well, where the tendency to truncate “backup and recovery” to just “backup” can have some negative and self-fulfilling results.

 

Yesterday Searchstorage.com published a Q&A with Curtis Preston, widely known as Mr. Backup. The topic was around the use of snapshot technology for data backups – basically a look at the increased use of SAN-based technology as an alternative or complement to traditional backup solutions.

Curtis brings some great points to the discussion and argues that, if you want better backup, snapshots is the way to go. I tend to agree with him. I’ll try to answer some of the questions that he leaves open, since the question of backup transformation is probably broader than I can cover in one or even a few blogs. The poignant fact that Curtis points out at the end of the Q&A is this: “…the backup and recovery space moves at a glacial pace. Backup people, by nature, are paranoid.” Therefore, I think it’s up to us as a collective – vendors, subject matter experts, and industry analysts in conjunction with end users – to redefine that space.

As regular readers of our blog can attest, we are serious about data protection.  This seriousness stems from an understanding that when clients seek data protection and data recovery solutions, it is not just data they are looking to protect.  They are making a move to protect their reputations, too.  Access to data is mission critical to any business, and any error of judgment in this area can result in the company, clients and investors losing money.  Therefore, all steps necessary to avoid these mishaps must be taken as a means of reputation control.