I'm Claus Mikkelsen, Chief Scientist for Hitachi DataSystems and we're here today to talk about enabling a virtualized world. Now,what do we mean by that? Well, we're talking about storage virtualization here,and let me draw a typical configuration that you might see in a large data center.You will have many, many servers or hosts. Those servers will be attachedtypically to a SAN, a Storage Area Network and that Storage Area Network willbe attached to one or more arrays. And we will call these arrays from VendorsX, Y and Z.
Now, the problem is that storage typically is very difficultto manage and if you have different vendor storage on your data center flooreach of those vendors will have a different set of commands and APIs andmanagement interfaces to manage the storage on those arrays. So whatvirtualization does is it gives you the ability to manage all of theseheterogeneous arrays as if it was one large pool of storage with one set ofinterfaces and one set of commands.
So for example, you may have Oracle applications sitting uphere. You may have an SAP application sitting on this host. You may have manyother applications sitting on this host. If they and the storage administrationactivities have to deal with multiple vendors storage-in other words, aheterogeneous environment down here-that makes it difficult. If it has tomanage and deal with one large pool of homogenous storage, suddenly theprocesses become much simpler.
Now, there are different ways to do virtualization. You caninstall virtualization software on each of the three hosts or hundreds ofhosts, depending on what you have. This is called Server Based Virtualization.You can install appliances or intelligence switches within the storage areanetwork fabric. This is called Network Based Virtualization. Or you can installan intelligent storage array that does virtualization at the array level andyou can insert and plug in heterogeneous storage into this array, and this iscalled Array Based Virtualization.
Now, once you have that then you can do a lot of things toimprove your overall business stature. One of the demands these days, throughcompliancy, government regulation or just good business practices is to containa copy of critical data at a remote location so that if you lost your primarydata center you can recover at this remote location. Enabling a virtualizedworld once we have that makes this much easier because now you can have dataspread over heterogeneous storage arrays treated as if it was one large poolfrom the same vendor and do the replication to the remote site much more simplyand easily than you can today.
Now, what are the benefits of virtualization? You can takethe complexity and reduce it dramatically because you're managing one largepool as opposed to separate individual arrays. So complexity goes down, totalcost of ownership. This is something everybody is concerned about, TCO. TCOimproves because you've got one thing to manage as opposed to many things tomanage. You've got one set of licenses to enable, for example, replication,instead of many. So the overall TCO can improve dramatically.
Headcount: There has been an estimate that it takes aboutone administrator to manage 10 terabytes of storage. We would expect withvirtualization, what's it's enabled, that that one headcount can now manage 30,perhaps 50, perhaps 100 terabytes or more with one additional headcount.
So now you've seen the three different ways that we canenable virtualization in the server, the network and the array. You've seen thebenefits of virtualization to your organization and hopefully now you can seehow this whole thing ties in to your business practices.
