Virtual Storage Gains Traction with Vendors

A number of factors, including management efficiency and cost savings are expected to further accelerate virtualization of storage resources. As mentioned in this Enterprise IT Planet story, provisioning virtualized storage is also getting a great deal of attention, as vendors begin to implement policy-based management schemes in their products.

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"Provisioning virtualized storage is becoming easier as vendors begin to implement policy-based management schemes in their products,' said Mike Karp, vice president and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates. 'By reducing the need for operator intervention, the new software greatly reduces the need for both planned and unplanned downtime that has always been associated with storage provisioning data migration.'

"He also calls attention to the ways in which delivery mechanisms for storage virtualization are evolving. Appliances, for example, are being heavily used by vendors, although this term can be a bit misleading. Early appliances were hardware-based. They were easy to install, easy to manage and did one thing quite well, said Karp. Today, however, appliances themselves may be software-only, which he believes is generally a good idea, as it gives managers the flexibility to install software on pre-existing hardware."

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