
Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization - A Contributed Series by DataCore Software
Big Data Is Almost Here -- Using a Storage Hypervisor as an Agent of Change, written by DataCore Software President and CEO George
Teixeira
There weren’t any telescopes on earth 65 million years ago when the
six-mile-wide asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs approached.
Even if there had been, there’s not much to be done about a gazillion
tons of rock moving faster than a speeding bullet.
Big Data – ultra large scale data storage and analysis – is the data
center equivalent of that big rock, but it’s not arriving without
warning and it doesn’t have to be an extinction-level event for IT
professionals. To the contrary, it offers a unique opportunity to
re-architect your storage management infrastructure in a way that makes
it more adaptable in every respect and more easily aligned to business
needs.
As profiled in the New York Times
last Sunday, Big Data is transforming business, government, and
education. One researcher reported that a study of 179 large companies
showed that those adopting the data-driven decision-making that Big Data
makes possible “achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6
percent higher than other factors could explain.”
This shows that Big Data is more than just big. It’s restless, too, best
used when hot. Let it cool off and you lose the situational awareness
that can lead to big-time financial rewards. It’s not just a matter of
storing a gazillion bytes – you can’t possibly store it all, so your
retention policies have to change, and the need to widely share it as
quickly as possible means your networking strategies have to change as
well.
Fortunately, there’s a fundamental storage technology that can be a big help in adapting to Big Data: the storage hypervisor.
Even better, the benefits of this software layer, which insulates you
from all the hardware variables that Big Data can throw your way, kick
in long before Big Data arrives. A storage hypervisor is an agent of
change: you get the pay-off today and a future-proof storage
infrastructure.
A storage hypervisor enables you to pool resources, automatically
allocate space and direct traffic to the optimal tier, cache data near
applications for higher performance, and manage it all centrally.
Resource pooling has the most immediate impact, because you can
aggregate all of your storage capacity, without regard for brand, model,
or interface, and easily reclaim unused space. Looking forward, this
capability is key to integrating on-premise storage with cloud storage –
a necessity to keep from getting squashed by Big Data.
The automation offered by a storage hypervisor gives you just-in-time
storage allocation for highly efficient use of disk space, and the
ability to dynamically direct workloads to the right storage resource
(auto-tiering), based either on access frequency or business rules, so
that the hottest data gets the most attention. With auto-tiering and
bridging capabilities like Cloud gateways, the right storage resource
includes not only disk devices, but solid state disks or flash memory
devices for performance, or Cloud storage providers for virtually
unlimited capacity. This makes it easy to balance data value and the
need for speed against price/capacity constraints, something that Big
Data is going to make ever more necessary.
A storage hypervisor can also cache data in main memory for rapid
retrieval and fast updates. This turbocharges native disk array
performance, especially if it’s combined with self-tuning algorithms.
The result is that even off-premises storage can look local – again, a
big “win” for Big Data.
Finally, with Big Data, your storage infrastructure is only going to get
bigger, so centralized management of all your storage resources is a
must-have. It gives you the equivalent of a universal remote for
storage, no matter what it is or where it’s located, and is key to
managing the mirroring and replication needed for high-availability,
disaster-proof storage.
The fallout from Big Data is going to transform business computing at
every level, so if you don’t want to end up a data dinosaur, now’s the
time to transform your infrastructure with a storage hypervisor. A good
place to start is Jon Toigo’s Storage Virtualization for Rock Stars
series, starting with Hitting the Perfect Chord in Storage Efficiency,
which will give you a good overview of how a storage hypervisor can
help you increase engineering, operational, and financial efficiency.
[Photo Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Impact_event.jpg]
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About the Author
George Teixeira is President and CEO of DataCore Software. See full bio here.