
Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization - A Contributed Series by DataCore Software
All Virtual is Not Enough; Managing Physical, Virtual, Old and New is "Real World" - written by DataCore Software President and CEO George
Teixeira
We at DataCore think the
"all or nothing" proposition offered by vendors that can't address both the
virtual and physical world is a mistake, and an expensive one at that.
Virtualization and Cloud Computing comes with an assumption that it is better to
replace your existing investments in servers and storage and start over to meet
the higher demands for performance and availability. DataCore sees this as a
major obstacle and has thus designed its storage hypervisor to work across
existing storage investments; it improves and supplements them with a powerful
feature set. Managing both the physical and virtual and the mix of old and new
platforms and device types cannot be ignored.
It is interesting to note
the large number of new vendors that have jumped on the pure "all virtual" model
and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. They do
not deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device
type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and
virtual environments.
These virtualization-only
vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that
is connected to this world is virtual, open and simple - devoid of the messy
details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like most IT shops?
Virtualization solutions
must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical
environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not
work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are
the norm.
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About the Author
George Teixeira is President and CEO of DataCore Software. See full bio here.