STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS · STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS ... “Understanding Virtualization and Cloud in the Enter- ... PERCENT OF DATA CENTER

NEXSAN 2013 STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTSPAGE 1

STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS

INSIGHTS FROM THE MIDMARKET


ORGANIZATIONS THAT MAKE A GREATER COMMITMENT TO VIRTUALIZING THEIR OPERATIONS GAIN GREATER EFFICIENCIES.


Compared to peers who have virtualized a smaller percentage of their data centers, respondents who have adopted virtualization technology across more of their data operations experience –

1. Better returns on infrastructure investments

2. Greater confidence in virtualizing a wider range of applications

3. More effective, comprehensive use of virtualization tools

4. Faster adoption of performance-accelerating infrastructure

5. Sharper focus on performance and manageability

These data points correlate regardless of the size of the data center, indicating that IT teams of any size can gain significant benefits from implementing virtualization across more of their operations.

SURVEY TOPLINE


PREFACE

The mindset with which an organization approaches its virtualization initiative has a profound effect on its success. Forrester researchers James Staten and Galen Schreck describe a progression in how organizations (regardless of size) evolve to adopt virtualization. This “path to virtualization maturity” outlines the actions and mindset of organizations as they move toward fully exploiting the technology’s benefits.

Note that every stage of this progression focuses on the experience, knowledge and operational requirements of the organization virtualizing its infrastructure, not its size or budget. Any organization – no matter how large or small – can significantly boost the efficiency and value of its virtualized environment by committing to a long-term vision for its implementation of virtualization technology.

Adapted from: Staten, James. “Understanding Virtualization and Cloud in the Enter-prise.” 2010 Trend Micro Enterprise Summit: Securing the Virtualized Enterprise – Preparing for the Cloud, Oct.11-13, 2010; La Jolla, CA.

Acclimation

Concept stage

Learning

Test deployments

Mindset shifts from physical to virtual server

Production deployments

VM lifecycle management

Now operational efficiencies

Business continuity deployment

Business partners drive VM sprawl

Highly automated

Multi-tenancy

Chargeback model

StrategicConsolidation

Process Improvement

Policy-Based Automation


THE SURVEY

Virtualization is well-established as a key strategic technology in large enterprises, delivering the scalability and agility needed to handle the vast data growth and shifting business priorities that define these organizations. Many organizations with smaller IT teams are also adopting virtualization, some to address a specific tactical need and others as part of strategic initiatives to become more nimble and efficient.

To learn more about this growing trend, Imation surveyed more than 1200 IT professionals (predominantly in enterprise organizations with 100-1000 employees), asking a variety of questions related to their use of storage systems in virtualized environments.

Survey responses indicated multiple levels of experience with virtualization, ranging from small- scale implementations to enterprise-wide deployments encompassing hundreds of virtual servers and vast quantities of storage. This report reveals indications of where smaller IT teams see the greatest advantages from virtualization, and how increased adoption is creating new storage priorities and trends in the market.


THE SURVEY

Wide-scale virtualization deployments are common among large enterprises, but smaller organizations are increasingly adopting the advantages of a comprehensive, long-term approach to virtualizing their IT operations.

The majority of survey respondents come from organizations of similar size (100-1000 employees), yet their virtualized environments range from less than 25 terabytes to more than a petabyte of total storage. This illustrates the appeal of virtualization to a broad cross-section of IT operations.

26-100 TB

< 25 TB

> 1 PB501-999 TB

251-500 TB

101-250 TB

30%

39%

5%5%

7%

14% ��RESPONDENTS’ TOTAL STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS


1 BETTER RETURN ON INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS

Doing more with less is a fundamental requirement when competing against organizations with substantial budgets and extensive IT departments. Achieving such efficiencies demands a thoughtful, strategic approach to both the deployment and management of a virtualization initiative.

Consolidation ratio (the average number of virtual machines residing on each physical server) is a key measurement of efficiency in virtualized environments. When more virtual machines can be consolidated, fewer physical servers are deployed and managed, reducing costs and complexity.

Organizations with more of their operations virtualized gain greater consolidation efficiencies. Respondents virtualizing at least 60% of their environment are largely achieving consolidation ratios of 15:1 up to 25:1.

These organizations enjoy related efficiencies including reduced hardware costs, less management complexity, lower power and cooling costs, and greater agility in scaling and reapportioning server and storage resources as needed.

44+132+116

+108=

60+156+140

+44=68+164

+128+36=

128+196

+68+12=

316+68+12+4=

100% virtualized

80% virtualized

60% virtualized

40% virtualized

20% virtualized

<8 9-15 16-25 >26

RESPONDENTS’ CONSOLIDATION RATION BY PERCENT OF DATA CENTER VIRTUALIZED


2 CONFIDENCE IN VIRTUALIZING APPLICATIONS

Common applications such as websites and databases are low hanging fruit for virtualization projects. Because these applications are relatively straightforward to bring under a hypervisor, organizations are often comfortable working with these as pilot applications, learning as they go.

Unfortunately, some organizations stop with these tactical implementations, robbing themselves of the benefits that a fully-virtualized operation can bring to their operation.

As forward-thinking organizations move ahead on a well-considered virtualization path, the experience breeds success with more specialized, and frequently more complex, applications as reflected in these results.

These IT teams are able to free these applications from technology siloes, running them on flexible, heterogeneous platforms. In turn, this approach usually brings even greater efficiencies in manageability, performance, and availability.

720+910 +650+870 +410+790 +420+750 +440+720 +300+610 +280+480database

website

crm

financial

exchange

procurement

supply chain

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

<250 tb >250 TB

APPLICATIONS NOW VIRTUALIZED OR PLANNED IN NEXT 12 MONTHS


3 MORE EFFECTIVE USE OF VIRTUALIZATION TOOLS

Organizations that fully exploit the capabilities of virtualization technology are characterized by deep product knowledge and broad deployment experience.

For example, VMware® vSphere® APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), integrated into vSphere, delivers significant storage performance and management benefits. Yet when survey respondents were asked if they had implemented VAAI, it became clear that awareness was much more prevalent among organizations that had placed more of its operation under a hypervisor.

Among respondents with 20% or less of the data center virtualized – those who may be virtualizing in a tactical or test mode – 3 out of 4 respondents were unaware of VAAI.

Conversely, about half of those surveyed who have virtualized 80 to 100% of their environments are either using VAAI or are in active consideration. Leveraging their deeper experience and familiarity with virtualization technologies, these organizations are positioning themselves to achieve far better performance than their competitors –at no additional cost – through a deeper knowledge of the tools of the virtualization process. implemented considering no plan / not aware

30%

23% 59% 29%

2% 45%23% 26%11%

20% virtualized

60% virtualized

100% virtualized

��

RESPONDENTS’ VAAI AWARENESS AND PLAN


4 MORE USE OF STORAGE ACCELERATION TECHNOLOGY

Virtualization makes very different demands on storage than a traditional physical server architecture. The heavily randomized read/write operations inherent to virtualized operations challenge organizations to boost storage system performance while maintaining cost efficiencies.

To meet these challenges, organizations of all sizes are increasing their deployment of flash storage or solid-state drives (SSDs).

Here, respondents using solid-state technologies are categorized by the total amount of storage supporting their virtualized operations. Hybrid storage, which uses a small amount of flash to accelerate affordable disk-based storage, is the #1 method of integrating flash, and those organizations with more storage under a hypervisor choose any flash option more than those with less.

This, again, reflects a different mindset about virtualized infrastructures from organizations with a deeper experience with the technology.

<250 TB <250 TB <250 TB>250 TB >250 TB >250 TB

Hybrid Storage SystemCaching ApplianceTiered Flash Storage

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0% 76+324

=160

+240=

100+300

=200

+200=

156+244

=244

+156=

deployed or planned not planned

RESPONDENTS’ USE OF SOLID STATE ACCELERATION BY TYPE


5 MORE PRIORITY ON PERFORMANCE, MANAGEABILITY

Out of 20 different selections, respondents’ top three choices are shown here.

While performance was a primary concern for all of the respondents, those with greater amounts of storage under virtualized operations tended to place the most value on attaining the highest possible system performance. This practice tends to maximize overall operational performance, particularly when accelerated with flash storage.

By contrast, respondents’ organizations with less storage under virtualization appear to be more concerned about the price/performance metric typically used in traditional physical infrastructures.

The third highest priority cited by survey respondents relates to storage manageability. Respondents demonstrated preference for unified SAN/NAS systems that provides a single solution for presenting shares and LUNs simultaneously. Note that organizations with larger virtualized storage deployments place even greater emphasis on the significant management benefits of unified storage. <250 TB <250 TB <250 TB>250 TB >250 TB >250 TB

Unified StorageRaw PerformancePrice/Performance

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0% 364=

256=

256=

364=

112=

192=

RESPONDENTS’ TOP THREE PRIORITIES FOR CHOOSING A STORAGE VENDOR


We’d like to express our gratitude to the 1200+ IT experts who completed this survey. Please don’t hesitate to connect with us with questions, thoughts, or suggestions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON NEXSAN STORAGE SYSTEMS

contact us at 866.463.9726 (+1.805.418.2700 outside of North America) or on the web.

ABOUT IMATION

Imation is a global data storage and information security company. Imation’s Nexsan portfolio features solid-state optimized unified hybrid storage systems, secure automated archive solutions and high-density enterprise storage arrays. Nexsan solutions deliver high performance for mission-critical IT applications such as virtualization, cloud, databases, and collaboration; and energy efficient, high-density storage for backup and archiving.

Imation Corp. 1 Imation Way, Oakdale, MN 55128-3414 | p.651.704.4000 f.651.537.4675 | www.imation.com/nexsan

© Imation Corp. Imation, the Imation logo, Nexsan, the Nexsan logo and NST are trademarks of Imation Corp. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. (Rev.09/19/13)

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STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS · STATE OF STORAGE IN VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS ... “Understanding Virtualization and Cloud in the Enter- ... PERCENT OF DATA CENTER