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But then, the waters were suddenly muddied: everybody talked about virtualisation, but it somehow became spoken of as an end in itself, rather than a mean to an end, and few said the same thing anyway. Six years on and the waters run clearer: storage virtualisation is once again an acceptable topic of conversation and is accepted as offering significant benefits to data management. Its layer of abstraction unifies everything and makes it all look the same, providing a utility model for storage. It provides a way to bring storage services into the network without any reliance on operating system or storage-specific tools; this is the true value and is what many failed to realise.

Today, virtualisation is heading decisively towards services, to where it was always really headed. The leading virtualisation solutions such as FalconStor’s IPStor comprise an ever-growing suite of tools to enhance data performance, availability, and recoverability, including data mirroring, high availability, replication, tape backup enhancements, point-in-time copies, point-in-time data recovery and application integration.

And there’s a second new direction as well: providing the storage services above without having to virtualise data at all, i.e. without having to migrate data into a new, proprietary format. Put another way: providing the key benefits of virtualisation without the perceived risk factors. FalconStor offers a means to accomplish this using its patent-pending Storage Service Enabler technology, part of its open, standards-based IPStor software platform that provides the features which have, until now, been the preserve of proprietary schemes. The history of technology of all kinds proves one thing: ‘open’ is better.
Ultimately, virtualisation is just a technique used in the state-of-the-art data protection solutions offered by Falconstor. Today, these include the VirtualTape Library (VTL), Single Instance Repository (SIR) and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solutions, together representing a revolution in data protection.

A few years ago, the main focus was on backup itself. Emerging technologies were all about assurance that a backup could be completed within the available backup window. This concept evolved into a restore discussion until, recently, we realised that even the restore is not enough. Today we need an application to be back online within the shortest period of time possible. It’s not backup, nor is it restore that matter: recovery is what really counts. Recovery and, therefore, business continuity.

Virtualisation allows us to get more out of the limited resources that are available, while meeting new requirements for system and application recovery – requirements that will continue to evolve. It’s evidently not a goal itself, will remain the core technology that is enabling the ongoing revolution in data protection. And in today’s data society, data protection is the biggest step in ensuring business continuity.

SNIA definition of DLM:

The policies, processes, practices, services and tools used to align the business value of data with the most appropriate and cost-effective storage infrastructure from the time data is created through its final disposition. Data is aligned with business requirements through management policies and service levels associated with performance, availability, recoverability, cost, etc. DLM is a subset of ILM.

SNIA definition of ILM:

The policies, processes, practices, services and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost-effective infrastructure from the time information is created through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business requirements through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata and data.