Welcome to The Virtual Viewpoint: Storage Virtualization - A Contributed Series by DataCore Software

When Moore's Law Isn't Enough: Virtualization and the New Era of Technology Economics Written by DataCore Software President and CEO George Teixeira

This time it’s clouds of computing, not clouds of steam.

The financial industry is a bellwether for business computing in general. IT is so central to their business model that they’re among the first to grasp at disruptive technologies. That’s what makes Rubin’s Law so important.

“The geometric growth rate of computing demand … will drive computing costs past the point at which Moore's Law will keep the costs manageable.”

As Howard Rubin, CEO and founder of Rubin Worldwide noted in a very interesting article, this is already happening in the financial services sector. Moore’s Law isn’t enough anymore. I was delighted to learn that we’ve been through this before: barely halfway through Victoria’s reign an English economist saw the same thing happening with coal-based technologies like the steam engine.

One of the observations that Rubin’s Law is based is already familiar to IT professionals in just about any size company: the rapid growth of storage. Rubin reports that storage is growing at 45% at the big banks, due in large part to their enthusiastic embrace of Big Data. Even in firms scaling less dramatically, the agility demanded by server virtualization is inexorably driving storage into the cloud, first private, and then hybrid with public clouds.

That’s why storage hypervisors are booming. Their hardware and vendor-agnostic ability to combine all a firm’s storage assets into a single, easily-managed pool of virtual disks is critical to the process. With auto-tiering, a storage hypervisor like DataCore SANsymphony-V can direct the most demanding applications to the best performing storage, including SSDs. You can swap in new hardware and move existing assets down-tier to get the maximum ROI on them—even repurposing them for disaster recovery sites. Cloud gateways enable you to bring in very low cost tiers.

Meanwhile, across all your storage, RAM caching can accelerate I/O for all spindle-based storage assets, with improvement of up to 200% overall in I/O performance. Thin provisioning boosts storage utilization to as high as 90% without impacting performance. 

A storage hypervisor makes business continuity easier too. Snapshots preserve VMs without any burden on the server hypervisor. Synchronous mirroring delivers fault-tolerant, 100% uptime, and asynchronous replication supports remote-site DR.

For background, including a video, on the investment protection that DataCore’s software-based storage virtualization solution delivers, please see here: Outstanding Investment Protection

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