The Virtualization Opportunity (Threat?)

During the recent virtualization party known as VMworld, storage vendors had a surprisingly strong presence at a show that was mainly devoted to virtualizing servers. A host of storage companies introduced new products, and several issued survey results highlighting the challenges that storage managers face as a result of the rush to turn physical servers into virtual ones.

Virtual servers are causing major problems for storage managers, if the surveys from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), and Xiotech Corp. are to be believed. Now, we have to take this information with a grain of salt, since these companies are offering products to solve the problems their surveys are highlighting. But assuming a certain level of honesty in how the surveys were conducted (usually by respected outside groups) and how the results were reported, the data points are probably keeping many of you up at night. And they should.

The most frightening stat: Nearly one third of the 127 people surveyed at VMworld said the backup success rate for their virtual environment was under 60 percent, according to our story on the Symantec survey. Only 52 percent said their success rate was more than 80 percent.

For most businesses, that is unacceptable. Backups are an essential part of any IT or business environment, and failures can't be tolerated when they can result in lost business or lawsuits or other nasty things. It may also help to explain why 41 percent of the respondents said they were using two or more backup systems and why more than half said they were doing two backups -- one for single files and one for full images -- to ensure data protection.

Those results are not completely supported by the survey from Xiotech, where the backup issue only ranked fourth in a list of top concerns. As we reported, the key concerns expressed by 185 virtual server administrators were future capacity planning (32 percent), monitoring storage utilization (28 percent), allocating storage (20 percent), backing up or replicating virtual server storage (17 percent), and migrating data stores from one tier of disk to another (3 percent).And that leads to the EMC survey of 150 IT business professionals, conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) , which concluded that "many companies today feel unprepared to face the challenges associated with managing IT environments that include both physical and virtual elements."

Their top problem? Isolating root-cause problems within virtualized server environments. Still, nearly 60 percent plan to deploy storage virtualization technology in their VMware environments in the next 12 months, including block-based virtualization, thin provisioning, virtual SANS, and file storage virtualization.

Now, EMC offers products that it says will solve the management challenges; Xiotech offers products to solve the provisioning challenges; and Symantec offers products to solve the backup challenges. And they all have competitors that have products designed to solve all of those challenges. So, to state the obvious, storage managers and IT departments need to do their own research before they shell out some of their limited dollars for software products designed to solve specific problems. Especially when storage array vendors offer tools they say can take care of these concerns.

My question is whether you see these new challenges as an opportunity or a threat. Is this an opportunity to get more involved in the design of the data center environment and play a greater role in systems operations and management? Or is this a threat that just adds more work to an already overburdened to-do list, and forces you to deal with a rash of new and complicated issues that have no easy solution? Is this an opportunity to show management you can be innovative and do more with less, or is it something that increases your chance of failing in a crucial situation?

The virtual data center is quickly becoming a fact of life. How are you dealing with it?0