The values of virtualization

It's evident that virtualization still hasn't captured the hearts and minds of the storage-buying public at this point. With the technology having so much to offer, it is reasonable to ask just why aren't the virtualization vendors taking a serious piece of the storage revenue that is being spent these days?

Part of the reason, and we have harped on this before, is that the virtualization companies have not done a particularly good job of defining either their market space or their solutions for the world's IT managers. Another reason, a bit less obvious, is contained in the interesting relationship between the purchase of storage-area networks (SAN) and the implementation of virtualization.

SANs are moving into the enterprise IT space at a steady but slow pace. A major cause of the slow adoption rate is attributable to the fact that most components in today's SANs, despite vendors' interoperability claims to the contrary, have a tough time working with products from multiple vendors. This means that implementing a SAN requires either going with products from a single vendor (or a small group of vendors designated by the prime vendor), or going through major integration and interoperability challenges every time a new device is added to the storage network. As a result, at this point many IT organizations are opting to go the homogeneous, single-vendor route, gritting their teeth as they realize that by doing so they lose a lot of financial leverage by limiting their selection of suppliers.

Homogeneous SANs present a problem for the virtualization vendors, because one of the major benefits they can deliver is the ability to pool disks. More to the point, with virtualized storage the storage media can be pooled irrespective of vendors, size and configurations. And most to the point, this pooled storage is seen as a single volume and can all be managed with a single piece of management software. Applications and operating systems address the virtualized pool of data only, the individual pieces of storage hardware having become, in a sense, invisible.

This opportunity for an integrated storage management console to manage the entire storage resource offers tremendous opportunities, including the ability to add, shut down or reassign individual elements within the virtualized pool without bringing down the rest of the storage system. The bottom line: with such a capability, IT managers not only save by purchasing hardware from a variety of vendors, they can achieve a more efficient operation by managing this mix-and-match collection of devices from with a single piece of software.

Unfortunately, when selling into the homogeneous SAN environment, this major cost-saving benefit disappears, making it harder to achieve a quick payback on the purchase of the virtualization products.

The values of virtualization are by no means limited to the single management console, nor are they limited to SANs (although that is where most of the marketing direction is placed today). It seems likely that the vendors, many of whom have quite a bit to offer, might make themselves much more viable in this turbulent marketplace if they focused on some of the other benefits they are capable of providing.

In the mean time, these grey days of January and February may be just the opportunity for you to start looking into all of this. (Note to my readers in the southern hemisphere: your sunny summer days, which curiously enough come at the same time of year, are equally timely.)

There are lots of players in the SAN market these days, taking a variety of different approaches to the implementation of their solutions. I've listed some here for those of you who feel you are ready to set the bit between your teeth and really start to examine these guys. Such an effort may likely be worth your while.

Players in the SAN market:

Compaq www.compaq.com

Datacore www.datacore.com

Falconstor www.falconstor.com

Hewlett Packard www.hp.com

StoreAge www.store-age.com/storeage_web/index.html

Tivoli www.tivoli.com

TruSAN www.truesan.com

Vertias www.veritas.com

Vicom Systems www.vicom.com

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail.

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