Hi, I'm Jack Norris. I'm director of Virtualization Marketing forEMC. And today I'm here to talk about file virtualization. Companies today aredealing with an exploding amount of unstructured data. And unstructured dataare the non-data base types; files, documents, etc. And with storageadministrators, they have to increase storage efficiency, basically manage morewith less, while at the same time maintaining, if not increasing, servicelevels as companies move to 24x7. And this is definitely a tradeoff becauseincreasing storage efficiency means moving data, moving data for cost reasonsor capacity or to balance performance and when you move data it introducesdowntime.
So how does file virtualization work? Well I've drawn a series ofdiagrams here. All the circles represent clients and users or applications andthese green rectangles represent network storage devices or file servers. Andtoday the way these are connected are through physical links. So end users haveto know the physical path and where these files are stored. And foradministrators, when these file servers fill up or you've got lowerperformance, they need to move the data across their environment and movingdata is not simple. You need to take the data off line. You need to figure outwhich end users are using this data, coordinate with the end users and havethis intense battle plan to figure out how to relocate this data with the leastamount of disruption. And then once the data is relocated and users have tofollow a new physical link to find the data, this results in disruption. Itresults in confusion.
With file virtualization it changes all that. File virtualizationcreates a logical pool so that end users have logical names not physical pathsto access the data. And virtualization allows administrators to relocate datawithout disrupting the end user access. So with virtualization you increaseSLA's you increase efficiency, you lower total costs in the organization. Butall virtualization technologies are not the same. Some virtualizationtechnologies require the deployment of a proprietary appliance or switch andall of the end users have to be reconfigured to access this point and thisdevice then mounts all of the back end storage. This creates virtualization,you have a logical name to access this backend storage. However you have asingle point of failure and a single point of bottleneck in accessing all ofthis data.
A better approach is with global file virtualization. And globalfile virtualization provides the virtualization benefits without some of theseside effects. And how does it work? Well you have a global name space thatbasically updates and provides the logical view for end users. And then there'sa switch that plugs into an industry standard network and relocates the datawhile filtering traffic so that all of the access is not through thevirtualization appliance. So you get the benefits of virtualization as well asscalability.
So why virtualization? Dramatically increases storage efficiency.It increases service levels. It dramatically simplifies how administratorsmanage storage and as you look at file virtualization keep in mind that not allfile virtualization solutions are created equal. And for administrators thisallows them to manage more with less and allows them to eliminate late nightand weekend migrations.
