The Enterprise and the Lack of Integration

IT and cloud providers are facing a lack of integration across storage, backup, networking, security, and management functions in virtualized environments. As mentioned in this Internet Evolution article, this lack of integration is constricting the ability to more aggressively pursue virtualization and cloud computing and host more applications on both internal and external clouds.

"Storage: Server virtualization breaks storage. Server virtualization has been a big win in terms of cutting costs, but customers are finding that storage is a nightmare because of I/O performance problems at the backend. The integration answer is to make storage simpler by also virtualizing the backend resource and hiding the complexity of traditional storage management.

"Backup: Backup is extremely I/O intensive and because server virtualization eliminates waste, the resource headroom that backup applications used to have in a physical world is disappearing, making it harder to meet backup windows. This is simply unacceptable for many applications, and techniques to better integrate backup into the cloud are compulsory to support more mission-critical apps."