Virtual Data Centers Can Promote Business Growth

Part four in a series. Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO and the author of The Green and Virtual Data Center.

Virtual data centers enable data mobility, resiliency, and improved IT efficiency. There are many approaches and technologies that can be used to enable a green and virtual data center addressing different issues and requirements. Virtualization is a popular approach to consolidate under-utilized IT resources including servers, storage, and I/O networks to free up floor-space, lower energy consumption, and reduce cooling demands, all of which can result in cost savings. However, virtualization, specifically consolidation, applies to only a small percentage of all IT resources.

A virtual data center can, and should, be thought of as an information factory that needs to run 24/7, 365 days a year, to deliver a sustained stream of useful information. For the information factory to operate efficiently, it needs to be taken care of and seen as a key corporate asset. Seen as an asset, the IT factory can be invested in to maintain and enhance productivity and efficiency, rather than being considered a cost center or liability.

The primary focus of enabling virtualization technologies across different IT resources is to boost overall effectiveness while improving application service delivery (performance, availability, responsiveness, security) to sustain business growth in an economic and environmentally friendly manner. That is, most organizations do not have the luxury, time, or budget to deploy virtualization or other green-related technologies and techniques simply for environmental reasons -- there has to be a business case or justification.

Virtual data centers, regardless of whether new or existing, require physical resources including servers, storage, networking, and facilities to support a diverse and growing set of application capabilities while sustaining business growth. In addition, applications need to be continually enhanced to accommodate changing business rules and enhance service delivery. Application enhancements include ease of use, user interfaces, and rich media (graphics and video, audio and intuitive help), along with capturing, storing, and processing more data.Ask someone what virtualization of IT servers or storage means and the typical response is to consolidate under-utilized physical servers or storage systems to reduce power, cooling, floor space, and physical hardware costs. I commonly hear from IT professionals that not all of their servers or storage can be consolidated for various reasons. Those reasons include quality of service, performance, politics, financial ownership, security, software compatibility, and vendor support, to name a few.

As a result, while the benefits of leveraging consolidation via server virtualization are well known, not all servers can be consolidated for different reasons and the same holds true for storage and other IT resources. However, this does not mean that the majority of servers, storage, or other IT resources cannot be virtualized to enable transparent management for maintenance, technology updates, load-balancing, supporting business continuance (BC), or disaster recovery (DR), along with other non-consolidation-centric functions. In other words, with consolidation, we are just seeing the tip of the virtualization iceberg (or mountain).

There are several faces or functionalities of virtualization technologies beyond consolidation, including abstraction, emulation, and providing transparency for enabling enhanced management and flexibility of IT resources. For example, virtual tape libraries leverage abstraction and emulation to enable new disk-based technologies that combine replication, compression, and de-duplication to reduce data footprint and enable BC/DR to coexist with existing backup and data protection software, processes, and procedures. Another example is using server or storage virtualization to provide an abstraction layer to support BC/DR enabling transparent movement of applications for consolidated, as well as non-consolidated, servers.

Green and next-generation virtual data centers should be highly efficient, flexible, resilient, and environmentally friendly while economical to operate. There are many aspects of data storage virtualization that address routine IT management and support tasks, including data protection, maintenance, and load-balancing for seasonal and transient project-oriented application workloads.

One common misperception, given industry messaging, is that virtualization means consolidation and consolidation means virtualization. To the contrary, the reality is that there is life beyond consolidation and there are even more scenarios and far greater market opportunity for virtualization deployments then what we have seen in the first wave of consolidation-centric virtualization scenarios. There is a very large market opportunity for virtualization of servers, storage, and I/O networking in scenarios for enabling transparent data and application movement, supporting BC/DR and other common time consuming and disruptive IT infrastructure resource management tasks.Greg Schulz is the founder of StorageIO, an IT industry research and consulting firm. He has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and capacity planner for various IT organizations, and also has held positions with industry vendors. He is author of the new book The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC) and of the SNIA-endorsed book Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier).

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