Storage News

Shifting Storage Management For Virtual Storage

Infonetics recently spilled the beans in its latest annual spending survey, which showed that, on average, enterprise capital hardware budgets are set to rise some 25 percent this year, driven by increased requirements for both virtual and cloud operations. As noted in this IT Business Edge report, the idea here is to shift storage management away from blocks and files and more toward objects and workloads for individual VMs.

"But since every challenge is also an opportunity, we're already seeing new storage technologies designed to accommodate increased virtual demands. The latest is from startup Tintri, which has developed an appliance, the VMstore, that is said to excel in highly virtualized environments. Developed by former VMware researchers, the VMstore holds 1 TB of Flash and 16 single-TB SATA hard drives, plus enough compression and deduplication to handle hundreds of VMs at a time, all the while appearing like a standard DAS array.

"The idea here is to shift storage management away from blocks and files (no more LUNs, volumes and RAID groups) and more toward objects and workloads for individual VMs. In that way, the same techs who are managing virtual infrastructure can handle the storage component as well. The system also provides the scalability to allow enterprises to push virtualization past the current 30 percent level all the way to 80 percent, according to Tintri executives."