I recently caught an episode of a documentary series my kids were watching on MTV, called “Catfish.” In the show, people who were in online-only relationships tried to find out if the person they’d been chatting with was actually who she/he claimed to be. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that they usually weren’t. Think the Manti Te’o hoax.
As someone in the IT world, I began to think about other ways in which the virtual and physical IT worlds don’t always line up. As we turn to virtualization and the Cloud, we often struggle to integrate physical devices to support virtual systems. And just like in “Catfish,” the reality is often not what we’d hoped.
This is particularly true for SANs. We’re going from a one server, one application world to one in which many systems all access the same storage. The performance of traditional SANs has often been inadequate, and the difference between locally attached and virtually provisioned storage can be very noticeable.
Why is that? What aspects of traditional SANs are in conflict with virtual infrastructures? The fundamental problem is a lack of what I call “VM awareness.”
- Physical vs. Virtual System Performance (… Real People vs. Facebook Profiles)
- Bridging the Physical and Virtual (… Know Who You’re Talking To)
- Merging the Physical and Virtual (… Reality Check)
- First, your SAN needs to be able to handle a large number of IOPS.
- Second, your storage needs to be able to prioritize data
- Third, the system needs to deduplicate data blocks.
- Lastly, storage management needs to integrate with VM management.
By: Zenith Infotech
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