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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
IBM is a leader in the storage virtualization market and at present boasts over 2,200 deployments. Launched in July of 2003, IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is an in band block storage virtualization appliance. The product abstracts the idiosyncrasies of the underlying storage devices and provides a single management point for managing storage as a single pool or multiple pools. From a pool, SVC presents virtualized disks, potentially composed of storage from different vendors.
A storage pool simplifies the provisioning of storage to applications and hosts and allows under-utilized capacity to be freed. SVC supports an extensive range of IBM and non- IBM storage listed at www.ibm.com/servers/storage/software/virt ualization/svc/interop.html SVC supports the ability to create a single pool or tier of storage or if need be, to create multiple tiers or pools of storage. Through this approach, enterprises can create multiple storage pools with different characteristics that meet different SLAs and price/performance characteristics. SVC allows a storage administrator to migrate data from one storage tier to another regardless of whether the storage is from one or multiple suppliers. This migration occurs without any downtime to the application or the user.
Furthermore, SVC acts as a platform for delivering advanced storage applications like snapshots and replication across the entire storage infrastructure. Using FlashCopy (IBM’s snapshot technology), Metro Mirror (IBM’s synchronous mirroring technology across Metropolitan Area Networks) or Global Mirror (IBM’s asynchronous replication capability for replicating data across a Wide Area Network) options, SVC can become the central point for implementing data protection and disaster recovery strategies across the storage infrastructure.
SVC is based on a clustered, redundant, highly scalable architecture. SVC is deployed only in clustered pairs of appliances—each with 8GB of cache—running SVC software. A pair of SVC appliances (or “nodes”) is known as an I/O group. In order to ensure redundancy, a single SVC node is not a supported configuration. Adding another I/O group (that is, two SVC nodes) can increase cluster performance and bandwidth. A maximum of 4 I/O groups (a total of 8 nodes) can be added together in a single SVC cluster. Therefore, end users can start small and scale as their storage needs and I/O throughput profile changes over time.
Five Real World SVC Deployments
As part of this profile, we detail five end users who have deployed and used IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller for their mission-critical storage needs. Taneja Group interviewed each end user as to why they chose SVC and the benefits that they have realized from deploying storage virtualization in their environment.
Broadly speaking, each of these end users has made a significant commitment to storage virtualization and SVC. Each of the end users with whom we spoke have what we consider “significant” deployments utilizing SVC and virtualizing tens of TBs and in several cases hundreds of TBs of production data.
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