Dell White Paper Sample

Storage virtualization can simplify provisioning and ongoing management, increase storage utilization, provide unlimited scalability in capacity and performance, and enable online migration of data sets among controllers and storage tiers. By consolidating network-based storage into a simple, flexible, consolidated pool of storage that can grow in capacity and performance on demand (as can the Dell EqualLogic environment), storage virtualization is a key enabler for simplifying a virtualized IT infrastructure.

Historically, the adoption of storage virtualization technologies in SAN environments has been limited, primarily to enterprise data centers needing a tool for online data migration between heterogeneous storage environments. This add-on design allows for heterogeneous storage and data movement, but does not simplify management of the configuration. Most of these designs have been implemented as external appliances sitting within the storage area network. These devices generally add more complexity to an already complex environment – introducing additional points of management within the SAN, masking value-added features of the attached arrays, and limiting performance and scalability of the consolidated SAN storage pool to a single gateway hosting the backend storage. In the iSCSI realm, simple design alternatives make the promises of storage virtualization easy to achieve.