The idea of virtualisation of data storage, according to Stephen Ko, storage solutions consultant, at Hitachi Data Systems for Hong Kong and Macau, is to enable better use of what customers already have rather than have them buy and install more disks.
'Storage virtualisation is the best way to consolidate existing storage resources. At Hitachi, our storage virtualisation is based on controllers such as USP V or USP VM. These can act as virtual engines to consolidate a customer's existing external storage units and virtualise them into one storage pool.'
This means data centre managers can tier-up the virtualised storage pool and move data non-disruptively to different storage tiers based on access rate or availability requirements.
'This is a necessary step to match data and storage tiers cost-effectively because not all the copies of tier-1 application data need to reside on tier-1 storage as access or availability requirements decrease. Storage virtualisation is an effective tool for enterprises to address the exponential data growth in a cost-effective way,' Mr Ko said.
IBM recently announced a new member of its tape virtualisation family, the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7520 Solution.
Designed to enhance information life-cycle management by improving use of tape resources, this system enables tape virtualisation for open systems servers connected over fibre channel - a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking.