5 Benefits of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Based on Real World Deployments

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Five Benefits of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller Based on Real World Deployments March 2007 After many years of sluggish market adoption, we believe that storage virtualization has turned the corner and matured to the point where end users are finally deriving tangible business value from a virtualized storage environment. The technology adoption cycle for storage virtualization has proven to be particularly steep and challenging. Over the past five years, the industry has witnessed a Darwinian shakeout as many of the early pioneers have gone out of business or been acquired. Nonetheless, IBM and its System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) have stayed the course and are well positioned to capitalize as the market for storage virtualization expands. For this profile, Taneja Group conducted interviews with five IBM SVC end users to ascertain the real world benefits that they have realized from SVC and their motivations for deploying the technology. Each of these end users has chosen to make SVC a central part of it storage infrastructure strategy and leverage the technology to support their mission-critical applications. From these interviews, it became clear that storage virtualization has become a core element of the storage strategy of forward thinking end users and that the technology is finally delivering the value that it had promised earlier this decade. In this profile, we briefly introduce IBM SVC, detail the types of end users with whom we spoke, characterize their environments, and then analyze five tangible benefits of storage virtualization that emerged from our interviews. Meet IBM SVC A storage pool simplifies the provisioning of storage to applications and hosts and allows IBM is a leader in the storage virtualization under-utilized capacity to be freed. SVC market and at present boasts over 2,200 supports an extensive range of IBM and non-deployments. Launched in July of 2003, IBM storage listed at IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virt(SVC) is an in band block storage ualization/svc/interop.html virtualization appliance. The product abstracts the idiosyncrasies of the underlying SVC supports the ability to create a single storage devices and provides a single pool or tier of storage or if need be, to create management point for managing storage as a multiple tiers or pools of storage. Through single pool or multiple pools. From a pool, this approach, enterprises can create SVC presents virtualized disks, potentially multiple storage pools with different composed of storage from different vendors. characteristics that meet different SLAs and
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price/performance characteristics. SVC Five Real World SVC allows a storage administrator to migrate Deployments data from one storage tier to another regardless of whether the storage is from one As part of this profile, we detail five end users or multiple suppliers. This migration occurs who have deployed and used IBM System without any downtime to the application or Storage SAN Volume Controller for their the user. mission-critical storage needs. Taneja Group interviewed each end user as to why they Furthermore, SVC acts as a platform for chose SVC and the benefits that they have delivering advanced storage applications like realized from deploying storage virtualization snapshots and replication across the entire in their environment. storage infrastructure. Using FlashCopy (IBM's snapshot technology), Metro Mirror Broadly speaking, each of these end users has (IBM's synchronous mirroring technology made a significant commitment to storage across Metropolitan Area Networks) or virtualization and SVC. Each of the end users Global Mirror (IBM's asynchronous with whom we spoke have what we consider replication capability for replicating data "significant" deployments utilizing SVC and across a Wide... [download for more]