VDS - Highlights of IBM’s Virtualised Disk System
- Designed to combine storage capacity from multiple disk systems into a reservoir of capacity that can be managed more efficiently
- Designed to help increase storage utilisation by providing host applications with more flexible access to capacity
- Designed to help improve storage administrator productivity by automating provisioning and enabling management of heterogeneous storage systems using a simple common interface
- Designed to support improved application availability by practically eliminating storage-related causes of application downtime
- Designed to support advanced copy services from higher- to lower-cost devices and across storage systems from multiple vendors
- Designed to reduce costs and improve flexibility with iSCSI host attachment
- Delivered with 12TB raw SATA storage capacity
Key Features of VDS
Easy to Implement Virtualised Disk Solution is designed to take control of existing storage, retaining all your existing information. This ability helps speed and simplify implementation while helping to minimise the need for additional storage. Once Virtualised Disk Solution is implemented, you can make changes to the configuration quickly and easily as needed.
iSCSI server attachment
Virtualised Disk Solution supports attachment to servers using iSCSI protocols over IP networks, which can help reduce costs and simplify server configuration. iSCSI attachment avoids the cost of fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) in servers and reduces the need for fibre channel switch ports.
Complement Server Virtualisation
As described above, storage virtualisation with Virtualised Disk Solution complements server virtualisation with technologies such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Server virtualisation helps speed provisioning of new server images because provisioning becomes a software operation rather than requiring hardware changes. Virtualised Disk Solution is designed to support non-disruptive data migration between storage systems.
Server virtualisation helps increase flexibility and reduce cost for disaster recovery by enabling the use of different physical configurations at production and recovery sites. Common virtual server configurations are used on these different physical infrastructures. Similarly, Virtualised Disk Solution supports the use of different physical storage configurations at production and recovery sites yet helps create the same virtual configuration at each site. Without Virtualised Disk Solution, production and recovery site physical storage configurations would need to be similar, potentially increasing costs.
The Virtualised Disk Solution Space-Efficient FlashCopy function can be used to help reduce storage requirements when cloning boot drives for multiple virtual servers. When using this function, additional storage is used only for differences among servers instead of needing storage for each boot drive.
Reduce storage used for copies
The Virtualised Disk Solution Space-Efficient FlashCopy (SEFC) function is designed to dramatically reduce storage requirements when copying data by using additional physical storage only for the differences between source and target and not for the entire target virtual disk capacity.
Simplified Provisioning
Virtualised Disk Solution virtually consolidates your storage so that all of your managed storage is potentially available to any attached server, which offers great flexibility but also helps to improve storage utilisation by reducing “trapped” unused capacity.
Improve energy efficiency
Many data centres today are focusing on reducing their energy usage to reduce costs and out of concern for the environment. Virtualised Disk Solution can be a key tool to help you improve the energy efficiency of your data centre. It does so in three significant ways:
1 - Virtualised Disk Solution is designed to migrate data from older to newer disk systems without disruption to applications, which helps make it easier and quicker for you to implement more energy efficient storage.
2 - Virtualised Disk Solution is designed to simplify implementation of a tiered storage infrastructure and improve performance of lower tier storage, which helps optimise the mix of storage you deploy and may enable greater use of lower tier storage.
3 - Virtualised Disk Solution can help increase the utilisation of storage and reduce requirements for additional storage in the future, which can help reduce the total amount of storage required and so helps reduce energy use. The Space-Efficient Virtual Disks and Space-Efficient FlashCopy functions are designed to extend this benefit even further.
Summary
- Combine storage capacity from multiple vendors for centralised management
- Increase storage utilisation by providing more flexible access to storage assets
- Improve administrator productivity by enabling management of pooled storage from a single interface
- Insulate host applications from changes to the physical storage infrastructure
- Enable a tiered storage environment to match the cost of storage to the value of data
- Apply common network-based copy services across storage systems from multiple vendors
- Support data migration among storage systems without interruption to applications
- Supports consolidated disaster recovery site servicing more than one production location
- Enables almost instant recovery from disk backups
Want more information or a demonstration of the above, contacts us. We hold regular hour long lunch and learn sessions held in City of London and Harrogate or alternatively book a live concall session.
Contact Michael Yeoman for further details