2010 Prediction: Hans O'Sullivan, StorMagic

By Hans O'Sullivan
published: Monday, December 14 2009

Economic conditions will continue to make IT budgets tight.  Most organizations will be looking for a very quick return on IT investment. Many will be looking to reduce their operating costs by implementing a server virtualization strategy. They will also have difficulty hiring more employees to manage their IT environments. Maintenance and operating costs will force a hardware refresh but this will be offset by implementation of server virtualization.

Server Virtualization will become more broadly accepted in the SMB. Virtualization vendors will put additional focus on this growth area in 2010. Microsoft and Citrix are getting more aggressive and with their recent releases; they can offer competitive features. VMware has been working hard to build out their SMB offerings. With the recent release of Essentials and Essentials Plus, they have created SMB packages that reduce the cost and complexity of implementation. Many of the small and midsized organizations that can benefit from the features of server virtualization have not adopted it yet. The technology is widely accepted in the enterprise, but has seen slower adoption in the SMB due to cost and complexity.

Business Continuity will become a priority for the SMB. As they move to a server virtualization infrastructure, the SMB will be faced with a requirement to implement a Business Continuity plan. By consolidating independent servers and applications onto a virtual server platform the impact of a single failure becomes business critical. Organizations will need to provide seamless access to the application and data even in the event of a failure.

Planned downtime that limits user access will be a concept of the past. Users will demand that they have access to applications and data no matter what the time of day or night. This requirement will be another factor in both virtualization and business continuity planning.

Cost and complexity of shared storage will limit the success of VMware’s business continuity features in the SMB. SMB customers have had to go without the high availability and ease of management features they get with VMware HA, VMotion and DRS, because of the cost of the external shared storage.  It is also too complicated. Many storage vendors have tried to address the cost issue by releasing “lite” versions of their higher end SAN products, but they haven’t addressed the complexity issue.

Storage Virtual Appliances will remove the Business Continuity barrier to entry that most SMB’s face. Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) unlocks the resources (disk drives and processor) of the ESX server and provides a virtual SAN that enables datastores to be shared in the same way as an external shared storage system. By using the internal disk drives of the ESX server to create a virtual SAN, SVAs provide a cost effective shared storage environment without having to install a complex external SAN.

A SVA provides enterprise-class data storage services, but instead of running them on an external storage system it runs them in a virtual machine running under ESX. This enables it to take control of a VMware ESX server’s internal disk drives (commonly referred to as Direct Attached Storage or DAS). The SVA virtualizes these drives as part of the virtual SAN. The SVA uses the server’s DAS storage to create datastores, which can be made available to and shared by any ESX server on the network. The SVA runs in a standard VM and communicates directly with RAID hardware via an agent.

In most environments, virtual servers are implemented as part of a server consolidation strategy. Usually the servers’ applications are critical to the organization, and unplanned downtime is unacceptable. A hardware failure on a virtual server platform could result in many VMs and virtualized servers becoming unavailable. To prevent this downtime, it is essential that the entire virtualized environment is built to provide High Availability, with no single point of failure.  The SVA offers High Availability, so that even if an ESX server and its SVA become unavailable, its datastores can still be accessed.