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Let’s look at the business problems companies are faced with:

• Time to market for new customer facing applications
• Data agility for reporting and data mining applications
• Data migrations due to technology refresh or acquisitions
• Rapid recovery from corruption, attacks, viruses, or hardware issues
• Disaster recovery
• Data backup
• Data volume growth
• Information Lifecycle Management
• Risk mitigation
• Regulatory compliance

Larger organizations are throwing millions of dollars at these issues using traditional methodologies to attack the problem - traditional tape backup, array based replication, and tape shipping for DR, and disk cloning for rapid recovery of critical databases. Companies are also spending millions on consultants to figure out how to streamline the business and make the company more agile to beat the competition. But like those cool commercials expose, the deliverables of many of these projects can sometimes be “empty promises.”

Your first step in creating an effective solution to solve these problems should begin with creating strategic policies based on data classification.
Here is a simple 12 step guideline for cost containment within the 21st century data center.

• Classify the data
• Create policy based on the data classification
• Virtualize and consolidate the server infrastructure (GRID/VMware/Citrix/etc…)
• Virtualize the file systems (GFS/DFS/VFM/VxVM/etc)
• Virtualize storage into pools and class tiers (IPStor, TagmaStor, IBM SVC, etc)
• Place data in correct pool based on policy (FC/SATA/NAS/TAPE/WORM/VTL)
• Use correct protocols per pool (FCP/iSCSI/VI/IP/FC-IP/CIFS/NFS/DAFS)
• Use the correct technology per class (Infiniband/FC-SW/FCAL/IP/VI/SATA)
• Use standards (SMI-S/WEBM/CIM/SOAP/XML)
• Leverage transparency to the applications and users
• Automation
• Documentation

Now you need to ask yourself: “Why are we looking at Virtualization in the first place”?

The answer is virtualization provides the plumbing for a “Services Oriented Architecture” By services, I mean all the things that a COMPLETE virtualization solution needs to bring to the table to make it useful to the organization. The whole point of Virtualizing is to simplify the environment while gaining efficiencies of process and procedures to reduce overall costs. In other words, putting real meaning to the often used terms of “better ROI”, and “ Lower TCO”.

Virtualization at both the compute and storage layers offers many benefits. Virtualizaing compute facilitates reducing the physical server footprint, and makes disaster recovery easier for applications. Storage virtualization creates an abstraction layer between the compute elements and physical storage, which enables storage pooling and classification, host transparent data movement beetween physical storage devices (fixing tech refresh and making data migration real simple), and since the intelligence can now be located at the fabric layer, it eliminates the need to buy expensive licences for the arrays themselves. You can now buy storage in bulk at lower prices, and do things like data replication between expensive primary storage and lower cost SATA arrays for disk based backup and disaster recovery.

When looking at buying a storage virtualization solution, you need to be sure the solution is comprehensive and address all the data services needs you are looking to apply. The ability is pool storage and mirror data is only a small part of what the solution should bring to the table. A complete solution should be able to do a lot more in order to become the “Data Services Engine” for the organization to begin the transition to true “Cloud Computing”