Storage virtualization offers many benefits to businesses of all sizes. It improves the functionality of their IT infrastructure and results in tremendous cost savings.
Virtualization is a popular approach for businesses looking to reduce IT infrastructure maintenance costs. While the benefits of server virtualization are pretty straightforward, many managers and business owners are often confused when it comes to storage virtualization. To resolve this confusion the market has responded with low-cost virtual storage options. Some providers even offer NAS for free, so their customers can experience the benefits of storage virtualization before committing to a paid plan.
What are the main benefits of storage virtualization? Virtualization uses a network to create a software layer over diverse hardware devices, making it easier to manage server loads and maintain infrastructure. The increased efficiency then translates into increased profit margins.
Why You Should Visualize Your Storage
- It makes your IT infrastructure more reliable and less prone to hardware malfunctions.
- Better allocation of resources improves the overall performance of your system.
- Much lower hardware, deployment, and maintenance costs (especially if you need to run a large IT system).
- Increased agility, adaptability, and ability to scale up and down depending on your business needs, including changes in server loads, traffic, and user base.
Let’s take a close look at how storage virtualization can add value to your business.
How to Derive Value From Storage Virtualization?
To provide value to your business, storage virtualization has to be implemented the right way. It should be a comprehensive software solution paired with industrial-strength storage hardware.
Using open standards helps you avoid device vendor lock-in and stay independent from proprietary connectivity protocols, interfaces, and platforms.
You should build a system that has all the advanced storage management features to allow you complete control over your resources.
Additional features include accelerated backup, recovery, offloading host server tasks, mirroring, and improved system availability.
You have to make your infrastructure scalable, secure, and easy to use and deploy.
IMPORTANT:
In addition to improved cost-efficiency, a fine-tuned storage virtualization solution reduces the workload for your IT team and simplifies all system interactions for your end-users.
Reduced Overhead Costs
Virtualization brings down the costs associated with management and administrative tasks. You don’t need a large, experienced IT team to successfully manage your business data infrastructure. All routine operations can be performed in less time. Management also doesn’t require a lot of effort and specialized hardware knowledge.
Your IT personnel won’t have to spend their precious time moving around, configuring, and re-configuring physical storage devices and controllers. They don’t even have to visit the server room until it is absolutely necessary. All virtual volumes can be assigned and configured from a central location.
Finding a Storage Area Network solution with the right rates will surely save your company a ton of money. Make sure to compare SAN storage pricing options to see what fits your budgetary needs. Once you have selected the right SAN solution, you can benefit from virtual storage technology and enjoy an optimized business data infrastructure.
IMPORTANT:
You also don’t have to invest in a large inventory of diverse physical devices, as the system perfectly runs on x86 commodity hardware.
Interoperable Storage Hardware
Virtualization makes all your hardware interoperable. What does it mean? You can use pretty much any hardware device available on the market. In a virtual environment, all resources appear the same to your host server. Beneath that virtual layer, you can have diverse physical devices produced by various manufacturers. If you want to scale your system up, just plug in a new storage device and your system will increase the available space automatically.
You don’t have to manually configure every device to make it work with other hardware. It gives you the freedom to try different proprietary technologies without over-relying on a single vendor. Virtualized storage, in essence, is absolutely hardware-agnostic.
IMPORTANT:
The popularity of virtualized solutions on the market creates additional benefits by driving down the prices of storage appliances due to increased competition. Big HCI vendors, though, tend to impose hardware compatibility lists.
Faster Data Access
The speed with which you can access, create, store and replicate data that is vital to your business directly influences your financial results. A properly tuned and maintained storage virtualization allows you to execute all data-related operations at lightning-fast speed.
Remember, that your customers demand important data like information about your products, services, or prices, to be delivered without delay. Your marketing department also relies on a speedy analysis of consumer behavior data. Data is the lifeblood of your business. Your IT infrastructure should allow it to flow fast and without delay to give you a competitive edge.
Efficient Use of Resources
The main benefit of virtualized storage is the ability to maximize its space. Virtualization reduces wasted space, by allocating unused resources to running processes. You can use less storage when your system doesn’t need it or allocate all available resources during a sudden traffic spike. It means that you need much less physical storage to create a system with enough healthy redundancy to protect it from data overflow.
Your IT team will always have time and resources to respond to any critical situation that involves changing storage needs. Additionally, the system can be pre-configured to deal with the most frequent cases that require data allocation. You can set and monitor thresholds. The system will also signal when you need to purchase additional hardware storage space.
Conclusion
When properly implemented, virtualized storage adds value to the business. It allows your IT team to manage storage space easily, helps you avoid vendor lock-in, and reduces the need to buy additional hardware devices. Virtualization brings down the costs associated with deployment and maintenance. You can also scale your infrastructure up and down depending on your business needs.