Virtualization

It is estimated that today over 75% of workloads running on commodity x86 servers is virtualized. The speed at which organizations moved to virtualize their environments is a testament to the benefits it offers. Some of those benefits include improved utilization and increased flexibility.

Now organizations are turning to other areas of their infrastructure to see if virtualization can offer the same benefits. Some call this the move toward the software-defined data center and it includes virtualizing storage and the network.

Virtualized Storage

In a recent survey by ActualTech Media, the top three storage management challenges were capacity or capacity planning, performance bottlenecks, and scalability. It is possible that virtualizing your storage can help you address these three challenges.

Basically storage virtualization places your physical storage behind a software layer. Now all of your storage, no matter what manufacturer or technology, appears as a single volume. This allows you to manage that storage from a single pain of glass.

Capacity: Now you can see and use all of your available storage. Available storage space is not spread out in multiple silos.

Performance: With storage virtualization you tier your data. Most frequently used data can reside on your highest performance storage.

Scalability: You have more options to scale because all of the additional storage appears as a single volume. You also are not locked into a single vendor for expansion.

Server Virtualization

Of course if you would like assistance getting your server environment to that 75% virtualized or better, PB&J can help.