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SRM software can control costs

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Two words you are likely to hear more and more of over the next few years are 'storage virtualisation'. Although this may sound like a mouthful, it refers to something that many companies are finding increasingly useful. There are two ways to look at storage: you can look at the actual hardware, the disks, etc, or you can look at the data. If you use a PC with letters referring to disk drives as A, B, C, etc, you can name the drive in any Unix machine, such as Solaris, Linux or a Mac, anything you want, but you must still remember the names.

For normal users this is just about manageable, but imagine if the amount of storage you have begins to approach many terabytes? It becomes a nightmare. What if, however, the hardware and the 'map' - the layout - of the system were independent? Imagine you have a database that grows quite large, or you have video that takes up tremendous amounts of space but all you have to do is name the purpose the disks are being used for, you no longer have to remember the names because that is taken care of by the software. Also, when you need more space, you just add it. You do not have to worry about naming the new disks. That is a simplistic explanation of virtual storage.

Michael Chue is the managing director of Hong Kong and Taiwan for Symantec, the storage, security and system management solution company. He has spent a lot of time trying to help customers understand the particular challenges involved in handling storage virtualisation.

'A proper SRM [storage resource management] solution provides the capability to manage heterogeneous physical and virtual storage environments. When instrumented properly, SRM tools provide full discovery and visibility, end-to-end resource mapping, monitoring, alerting and reporting of virtual, logical and physical storage,' he said. There were other benefits as well, he said, including lower costs, but you must be careful with storage virtualisation: it, too, can become quite complex.

'By implementing virtualisation strategies, organisations will be able to control costs for space, power and cooling. However, as data volumes grow, managing storage will become even more complex in the virtualised environment,' he said.

It is for this reason that potential customers must look quite carefully at what SRM tools are available. If you chose the right one, you can save yourself a great deal of pain.

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