storage virtualisation

Storage Virtualisation is the process of taking many different physical storage networks and devices, and making them appear as one "virtual" entity for purposes of management and administration. It has tremendous potential for simplifying storage administration and reducing costs for managing diverse storage assets.

Today the data storage industry is one of the most dynamic sectors in information technology today. Due largely to the introduction of high-performance networking between servers and storage assets, storage technology has undergone a rapid transformation as one innovation after another has pushed storage solutions forward.

The viability of new storage technologies is repeatedly affirmed by the rapid adoption of networked storage by virtually every large enterprise and institution. Businesses, governments, and institutions today depend on information, and information in its unrefined form as data ultimately resides somewhere on storage media. Applying new technologies to safeguard this essential data, facilitate its access, and simplify its management has readily understandable value.

Simplifying storage administration through virtualisation technology has many aspects. Centralising management, streamlining tape backup processes, consolidating storage assets, enhancing capacity utilisation, facilitating data integrity via snapshots, and so on, are not really attributes of storage virtualisation, but rather beneficiaries of it. Storage consolidation, for example, is enabled by networking storage assets in a SAN. If there is only one large disk array to manage, virtualisation may not contribute significantly to ease of use. If there are multiple disk arrays, and in particular, arrays from different vendors in the SAN, storage virtualisation can help streamline management by aggregating the storage assets into a common pool.

Shift F7 helps clients to manage efficiently the storage resources available to them by offering vendor-independent consultancy and implementation skills across a range of storage technologies and products from simple RAID protected DAS solutions through to complex SAN, NAS and back-up/recovery solutions.