We have not made any signifcant strides in storage virtualisation, and it is not on my cards for 2010,” said a CIO of an IT services company CTO Forum spoke to. The company has adopted server virtualisation in a signifcant manner, consolidating close to 150 servers across the globe to less than 30.

This sentiment is echoed by Neeraj Pal Singh, Senior VP and CIO, Aditya Birla Group. “We have already implemented virtualisation using LPARs (logical partitions) in the servers supporting our critical applications. We have also adopted blade servers to decrease our server footprint. Now we are in the process of implementing server virtualisation and plan to bring down 19 physical servers to around two. There are no business imperatives currently to implement storage virtualisation since there are no signifcant constraints with regard to storage.”

In short, there are more pressing things in which to invest, so storage virtualisation is pushed down the list. For now.

Next year, things will be different. “We are evaluating the benefts of storage virtualisation and may consider it in the fnancial year 2011-12,” says Singh.

This is not to say all companies in India are slow to adopt storage virtualisation. Says Harish Shetty, Executive Vice President, HDFC Bank, “Our organisation has deployed virtualisation on Intel servers, AIX servers and on storage. We have more than 700 VMs (virtual machines) created on the x86 environment, 300 LPARs on AIX servers and more than 100 TB virtualised on storage.

We have reached a certain maturity level, both in terms of usage and in our process, and our next step will be to implement cloud computing.”

This is a refection of the storage growth needs of a company. Take a look at our survey of CIOs across various domains. From among the companies surveyed, those in the IT and the retail vertical have forecast similar storage growth requirements over the next one year (10-24%), as well as over the next 3-5 years (50-100%). Contrast this with the fnancial services industry, which forecasts 25-49% growth in storage requirements in the next one year, and between 100% to more than 300% over the next three-fve years. Companies with spiralling storage needs are likely to be the ones embracing storage virtualisation earlier than the rest.

It is not always burgeoning storage needs that make companies consider storage virtualisation. “The potential to cut infrastructure costs as well as operating costs, such as energy costs, are major business drivers. In our case storage virtualisation wasn't carried out to manage the growth in data, but to replace storage that had sweated enough. We have virtualised approximately 12TBs of storage,” says TG Dhandapani, Group CIO of TVS Motor Company.

Why virtualise?
As storage needs increase over time in an organization, various storage media get added. And with this come a set of challenges. There is a lot of storage space available on paper, but in reality, due to the way the storage resources have been deployed, the storage space available for use is limited. To address the immediate requirements, more space is bought, often in an unplanned manner. Net effect: a heterogeneous storage environment which becomes more and more difficult to manage, and increased expenses—not just those related to purchase of hardware and related software, but also for buying space, and paying energy and cooling bills.

In heterogenous environments, which are a combination of NAS and SANs, and multiple boxes, controllers and media, the storage of information often ends being in silos. Reaching the right bit of data quickly frequently ends up being a time consuming process, and companies often set their IT teams to create workarounds to be able to access the data. Migrating data from one storage media to another may be unpracticable in many companies. Hardly the most productive way to work, one could say. And not the fastest way either. Speed is of essence today.

Taking backups results in a lot of downtime for the application in question. With your business running day and night, can you afford to have downtime, even if it is for critical areas such as backup?

Enter storage virtualisation with its promise to end most of these woes. “Our investments in new storage boxes have reduced greatly,” says Dhandapani.

Shetty of HDFC Bank says, “The primary reason for embarking on storage virtualisation was to keep the cost of storage under control especially for backup, standby and reporting copies. Secondly, we wanted to optimise storage utilisation and remove silos. Thirdly, segmentation or tiering of storage was needed to provide different classes of storage based on various requirements. Lastly, we also needed easy and transparent movement of data from one storage to another without any downtime to the application.”

Benefits
Shetty continues, “We have been able to reduce the cost of our standby, backup and reporting copies. We have also been able to introduce the concept of tiered storage. We have been able to retire old storage by moving data from one storage to another using virtualisation.”

That is in essence the benefits that storage virtualisation offers.

Bring in tiered storage: What this means is that you don’t need to buy expensive enterprise-class storage for all your needs. There are applications and processes which do not need the highest-end equipment. With virtualisation you can select which applications need what type of storage and allocate accordingly, even do so dynamically.

Simplify management: You can do away with having to work with multiple software to manage all the hardware.

Increase utilisation: Once all your storage hardware is made to act like one through virtualisation, it is easier to make optimal use of the available storage space.

Increase availability: Storage virtualisation makes it possible to backup data and carry out data migration on the fLy. So your applications do not have to go offine as the backup or migration process is happening.

Reuse your existing hardware: Bringing in storage virtualisation does not mean having to give up boxes you already have. They can easily be brought into the storage pool, and assigned data as per their capacity and effciency. So your investment stays protected.

Companies are already well aware of the potential benefts. Says Singh of Aditya Birla Group, “We expect storage virtualisation to improve storage utilization, reduce complexity and management overheads and also help with tiering and aligning storage to the right applications or uses.”

So what are the challenges? Shetty says, “We have not seen any challenges with storage virtualisation till date.” The thought is echoed by Singh who adds, “Though we have not adopted storage virtualisation yet, a proper Return on Investment (RoI) needs to be carried out before implementing it. There can be benefts from storage virtualisation in environments with heterogenous SANs and multiple storage families (low-end, mid-range and enterprise storage models) provided that the virtualisation exercise is preceded by proper planning.”

Dhandapani suggests piloting a project. He says, “If the virtualisation projects are taken when the hardware is due for replacement, the proving of RoI will be easier and convincing.”

“If one has huge amounts of data, migration will be a challenging task. But ultimately one will reap the benefts as the data grows further,” says IOC’s Gupta.  

The benefits of storage virtualisationare now well understood, but it is not high on the priority list of Indian CIOs. There are bigger issues at hand that need to be tackled. Saha says, “At Apeejay, the basic problem was the proliferation of multiple servers and not the proliferation of heterogeneous storage boxes. Hence we never had a need to provide for a single window solution for the management of storage boxes. Currently, we don’t fnd a need for storage virtualisation and hence we may not embark on this exercise in the near future.”