The dynamic duo of virtual storage and virtual processing

I just read something published by my friends at Virtual Iron. Their new CEO, Ed Walsh, formally of EMC, presented at the Storage Decisions Conference in San Francisco. It struck me as quite insightful.

Here's a segment of what he had to say:

The benefits of server virtualization are very clear, but what’s often overlooked is the impact it has on users’ storage environments. While virtualization increases demand for storage, it also increases the complexity of the storage environment – especially as users try to take server virtualization into production and to support advanced use cases like disaster recovery. Existing server virtualization solutions, whose architectures pre-date today’s use cases, were not designed to work with shared storage and add additional layers of abstraction and complexity to storage environments. As a result, the value and performance of many storage solutions are being negated for users. Functionality is being duplicated, management tools are being impacted and scalability limited.

Users wrestle with putting their server virtualization solutions into production every day. They find solutions like VMware (based upon VMware's VMFS, a proprietary clustered file system) break all their storage infrastructure (backup, clustering, snapshots, CDP, replication and DR). Virtual Iron allows users to get all the benefits of server virtualization while leveraging their current storage infrastructure. Its platform delivers comprehensive server virtualization capabilities and enables customers to take full advantage of advanced storage server features such as thin provisioning, snap-shots, disaster recovery using storage server replication. It also supports all the policy-based management capabilities built on shared storage such as LiveCapacity® (automated load balancing), LiveRecovery™ (automated failover) and LiveMaintenance™. For more information, visit http://www.virtualiron.com/storage.

Snapshot analysis

I think that Ed's comments are particularly well taken. I believe that it is crucial that organizations have a complete plan, an architecture so to speak, that defines how they are going to put all six layers of virtualization technology to work in their datacenter. A piecemeal approach is likely to become a prison that eventually makes it hard for the organization to succeed.

Do you agree?