Storage virtualisation – the story so far? Benefits of storage virtualisation
Virtualisation has been the most revolutionary technology to emerge in recent years providing many benefits initially with servers, now with storage and the desktop. The impact of virtualisation in all spheres of IT has been marked. In storage it has enabled customers to harness the pockets of spare storage capacity that reside in their organisations, increasing utilisation and ensuring that the data is protected should one or more disks fail. As confidence has grown in the technology, the pace of adopting other areas of virtualisation has intensified.
Storage virtualisation enables you to pool all your storage and present one logical view of your data. This improves the management of data, control and efficiently utilises multiple, disparate storage systems across your organisation, giving you the ability to deploy and optimise these resources dynamically in real time.
Efficiencies can be gained from storage virtualisation, it can provide the following key functionality for both new and legacy storage systems:
- thin provisioning
- snapshotting – incremental back up
- de-duplication
- storage management - archiving strategy - using a combination of both disk and tape
- increased application integration
By implementing virtualised storage we can assist with the following areas; Storage Consolidation, E-mail recovery, NAS file and print, Back-up and recovery, Archiving and DR. Through our consultancy services we can assist with all aspects of storage strategy and information lifetime management. Contact us now for a free initial consultation and review of your present situation.