Software Defined Storage Rev. 2.0 - TN

Virtualising servers and storage systems has become
a vital part of an organisation’s IT strategy, no matter
how small the company is. The key objectives behind
virtualisation include optimising hardware resources
by consolidating them, increasing flexibility and
reducing the costs for energy, cooling or space requirement.
Storage virtualisation, just as server virtualisation,
leverages the existing physical resources,
centralises and simplifies management and can increase
availability by deploying live migration. In this
way, your administrators can transfer virtualised
environments from a physical server to another without
any system or operating downtimes.
Storage virtualisation leverages existing capacities
by delivering a fast and flexible supply of the required
storage capacities. For a long time, individual applications
were allocated with fixed storage resources in a
storage pool.
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Although the average IT budget grows by a
maximum of 5% each year, the IT landscape
is faced with increasingly more tasks that it
has to manage within the organisation.
Virtual storage machines
This created a typical over-provisioning scenario as
many of the applications did not utilise the storage
resources allocated to them. This is now over – thanks
to thin-provisioning which provides a method for optimising
utilisation of available storage capacities.
This results in an efficient allocation of data to improve
fast access and performance.
Virtual storage
identity
Host I/O and copy
management
Virtual
hardware
Processors, cache,
front-end ports,
storage media
Virtual storage
identity
Host I/O and copy
management
Virtual
Hardware
Processors, cache,
front-end ports,
storage media
Virtual storage software
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