2010 Prediction: Jim Johnson, BakBone

2010: View on the Virtualization Industry from the Storage Management Market

Virtualization, like most technologies is continuously shifting. As we dive into 2010 and more companies turn to technology to cut operation costs and expand their data infrastructure options, it is crucial to closely examine associated data management and protection needs and prepare for the future of your data center. Examining potential challenges in the year ahead and the technologies that provide solutions, helps you avoid major obstacles as your data center grows.

While it is true that server virtualization can make the system administrator's life simpler and more cost effective, it can also add complexity in a number of notable areas. Even with virtual machines (VMs), you still need to manage and protect each virtual server, and as it scales up - or sprawls - the virtualized data center of the future could have hundreds of VMs.

Additionally, the VMs will not only be in the data center. Departments and end users will set up their own, realizing that it allows them to acquire another server without having to go through the time and expense of a procurement process. Add the emerging option of cloud-based VMs and you could have thousands to manage and protect.

Tracking and discovery will therefore become major challenges, so you should check that your software supplier could provide discovery tools that will make sure you spot new VMs coming online.

Then there is management and protection. Managing 40 VMs is one thing, but managing 400 or 4000 is a rather different proposition. Data protection will need to be planned differently too - all the VMs on a physical server must share its physical I/O capacity, which creates a bottleneck, as does routing all the VM backups through a shared VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) server.

Newer technologies will help here. For instance, consider the likes of CDP/RDP (continuous/real-time data protection) and replication. They constantly update a second backup copy of the VM or application, so they move less data more often. If done right, CDP/RDP should always give you a valid recovery point that you can guarantee is consistent.

Server virtualization will also affect your storage infrastructure. If you want the ability to migrate VMs freely, you will want storage virtualization as well as server virtualization. Having more VMs to replicate and backup will require more storage space and bandwidth. 

To help here you should look to technologies such as thin provisioning. This saves storage space by only allocating physical capacity as it is actually used, but there are also standalone tools that can reclaim space by automatically inspecting and resizing a VM's file system.

De-duplication is another technology that can help. It understands that it is protecting multiple VMs and avoids storing duplicated data. For example, similar VMs will contain the same operating system files by looking for repeated patterns in the files and only storing the first such pattern. This reduces the amount of data that must be backed up, with users reporting compression ratios as high as 50:1 in some cases.

De-duplication can also reduce the volume of data that must be transferred over the WAN to a secondary data center for disaster recovery; though for this you need to ensure that the de-duplication is done at source, and not - as some schemes do it - once the data is at rest.

By closely examining these aspects and implementing the technologies to support your specific needs, the future of your virtualized environment will be brighter with fewer obstacles threatening your business continuity.