Last week I began to explore the benefits of VM-aware Storage by discussing how it cuts the risk of virtualizing critical applications. In this article we unpack another benefit of VM-aware storage–specifically how it enables information technology departments to become more responsive to the business by substantially reducing the amount of staff time that must be dedicated to dealing with storage.
Whether or not the aphorism “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” that Apple used in the early 1980’s actually came from Leonardo DaVinci, it nevertheless rings true. By that measure, legacy IT infrastructure falls far short of ultimate sophistication.
This lack of simplicity is a significant issue. As highlighted by Bob Evans, SVP Communications for Oracle Corp in his article “The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013”:
Customer-side CEOs in particular are growing increasingly fed up with the apparent black arts of IT operations that require larger and larger budgets without predictably delivering more and more business value.
His advice?
CIOs must be primarily concerned with bending the IT budget curve away from low-value legacy infrastructure and toward new technologies that liberate precious funding for innovation.
The good news is that a new generation of storage systems has emerged that make significant strides in the area of simplicity–a simplicity that does indeed free up precious staff resources for innovation. These VM-aware storage systems are designed for the virtualized data center and are demonstrably simpler to deploy and manage. For example, in the Wikibon article “Hybrid Storage Poised to Disrupt Traditional Disk Arrays”, David Floyer writes that “hybrid users indicated that fewer than five hours a week were spent in administration, compared to two-to-four times as much for traditional arrays with flash as a cache.”
What accounts for this resource-freeing simplicity? The answer given by those same users was three-fold:
- low latency
- ease of administration
- and the availability of a complete performance profile per VM
My first article about VM-aware Storage dealt with the third item on that list, describing how VM-aware storage cuts the risk of virtualizing critical applications by restoring visibility into storage system performance on a per-VM level, thus speeding the troubleshooting of any application performance issues. This article will focus primarily on the ways that ease of administration cuts costs–freeing IT to be more responsive to business needs for innovation.
An important element of the “ease of administration” equation for VM-aware storage is certainly the deep integration of storage management into hypervisor management tools. This gives IT staff a single primary locus for management and control of application performance.
VM-aware Storage brings the management of storage into the same “abstract, pool, automate” management construct that has been applied to CPU, memory and network. In the case of VMware, this integrates the management of thin provisioning, storage allocation and storage movement under the vCenter/vSphere banner. Another benefit of this integration is that storage performance data is presented alongside other the other data center resources that contribute to application performance–this is a good thing.
Tegile is one of several vendors acknowledged by VMware for bringing VM-aware storage to the marketplace, as seen here in VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s VMworld 2012 keynote presentation where he discussed the integration of storage into the vSphere management environment.
VM-aware storage brings a new level of simplicity to managing storage. This isn’t just nice or an expensive convenience for IT, it enables the IT department to be more responsive to business priorities. VM-aware storage will play an increasingly important role in the data center as CIO’s seek to shift time and money away from maintaining legacy infrastructure and toward enabling innovation.
DCIG is helping drive cost out of the process of understanding and evaluating data center technologies through our independent buyer’s guides. As it relates to VM-aware storage, these include the DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide, as well as a forthcoming Hybrid Storage Array Buyer’s Guide.