Deploy Server Virtualization with Data Storage

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/storage/?cm_mmc=agus_itmbitivv_2...
Kelly Beavers, of IBM, speaks about server virtualization and the profound impact it has on the storage environment. Virtualization is essential to the building out of a dynamic infrastructure. IT departments seek storage management and storage virtualization solutions in order to realize the true benefits that a virtualized data center environment can deliver.

My name is Kelly Beavers and I am the Business Line Executive for the Storage Software Portfolio at IBM.

Server virtualization is a really hot topic today and analysts are predicting that more and more customers will deploy server virtualization at really an increasing pace.

Interestingly, the deployment of server virtualization has profound impacts on the storage environment as well. In the old days, a server was a server and a disk was a disk, you plugged them in, you connected them with a wire, and you recorded the connectivity addresses across the two and bam, you were done. In a virtualized server environment, the servers and the applications are moving around all the time. So this notion of a one-time configuration between the servers and the storage no longer exists.

This is where tools such as IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center come into play.

TPC watches the movement of these virtual servers around the environment and watches as the storage expands and contracts with these movement and automatically records the configure information associated with that movement.

TPC presents a visual picture of the I/O path, really, from the virtual server, up to the physical server and then through the storage path, to the virtualized storage underneath and finally, the physical storage on the backend. With this view, administrators can always see whats happening in the environment. TPC also creates snapshots of the environment before and after changes are made and this allows the administrator to isolate any problems associated with the changes and deal with those problems.

In fact, when you combine this capability with the IBM SAN Volume Controller, you can actually take the recommendations provided by TPC and implement those on-the-fly inside the environment. And so application administrators can move the data around the environment without worrying about whats happening to the underlying infrastructure, because thats all being taken care of.

Virtualization is essential to the building out of a dynamic infrastructure. And IBMs offerings around storage management, data protection and storage virtualization really help clients realize the benefits that a virtualized data center environment can deliver.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• data storage solutions
• server virtualization
• storage environment
• Tivoli
• IBM
• Kelly Beavers