Server Virtualization: The Tip Of The Iceberg By Kim Tchang, SANRAD

Like iPOD for the consumer market, server virtualization is one of the hottest technology trends to sweep the commercial market. Many enterprises are deploying or investigating server virtualization to save power, cooling and management costs, improve asset utilization, and increase flexibility. However, server virtualization by itself is only the tip of the iceberg. To realize the full benefits from a virtual infrastructure, companies must also implement the other critical component to the total solution: storage virtualization.

Storage virtualization extends the benefits of server virtualization by providing simplified storage management, improved storage utilization, and better application performance. Moving from direct-attached silo storage to a SAN where storage can be shared in a virtual pool also provides significant power, cooling, and IT management cost savings.

Server and storage virtualization work together to deliver maximum ROI. For example, dynamic virtual machine failover, a key benefit of server virtualization software, can facilitate disaster recovery. It is incomplete, however, without dynamic storage failover, a storage virtualization feature. Ensuring high availability at the server application level solves only half the problem. If the data in the storage environment is not equally protected in an integrated virtualization solution, the servers may recover, but will not have access to the data they need.