Storage News

Safeguard Virtualization With SAN Uptime

Today's virtual environments place an exceptionally heavy responsibility on their centralized storage infrastructures. As noted in this Search Storage report, Live Migration and vMotion both require centralized SANs for virtual machines (VMs) to fail over and load-balance -- and almost every virtual environment has to implement a SAN infrastructure.

"Because of this requirement almost every virtual environment has to implement a SAN infrastructure, but it also increases the adverse effects and costs associated with a SAN failure.

"To illustrate my point, draw out the interdependencies between each component in your virtual infrastructure. For each component, draw a line to another component on which it relies. Continue this exercise until you map out the entire dependency tree. (The end result is similar to an FMEA scenario.)

"Notice that all the arrows eventually point back to your SAN infrastructure. As a result, your SAN infrastructure uptime must be close to, if not at, 100%. Any storage downtime, especially extended downtime, creates a catastrophic failure of your entire virtual environment, because it forces every VM, server and application to go offline."