Virtualize Storage with IBM for an Enhanced Infrastructure

Drive virtualization deeper into the infrastructure—and reap the rewards

Service Management in Action Virtualization has transformed the enterprise data center, leaving it more flexible, scalable, responsive to business strategies and cost-effective. But for an even better outcome, organizations should consider pursuing virtualization in even more depth.

Specifically, by virtualizing storage as well as servers, it becomes possible to get improved business value from storage while also reducing costs, and solving many pressing problems.

Consider that IT managers today are asked to accomplish more, using less, than ever before. IT services have become more and more integral to business strategies with every passing year. Finding new ways to keep those services up and running, by ensuring critical resources are always available, has become more important in proportion. And on the list of critical resources, storage is very close to the top.

But purchasing and deploying more storage isn't always going to be an acceptable solution at a time of diminished IT budgets and an unpredictable economy. Instead, IT managers need ways of getting increased value from storage through new solutions and management techniques.

Fortunately for them, IBM has a wealth of offerings designed to accomplish exactly that task. Two in particular—the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC)—are extremely well suited. In combination, they can make storage a fluid resource, comprehensively managed from a single point of control and allocated exactly where it's needed in real time—an ideal match for today's virtualized infrastructures.

The IBM System Storage San Volume Controller: Transforming storage into a fluid resource

“IT services have become more and more integral to business strategies with every passing year. Finding new ways to keep those services up and running, by ensuring critical resources are always available, has become more important in proportion. And on the list of critical resources, storage is very close to the top.” Consider the first of these two offerings, the SVC. This device essentially transforms storage from a resource that is static—tied to particular hardware such as systems or disk arrays—into a resource that is fluid.

Instead of storage existing in different amounts, at different points in the virtualized infrastructure, it becomes a logical pool; any service or application that requires more storage can draw from that pool. Then, when the need no longer exists, that storage is returned to the pool, where it can be utilized by different services altogether.

This reconception of what storage means, and how it functions, obviously implies a substantial boost of the availability and performance of all storage-dependent applications and services. No longer can they be starved for storage during peak demand periods; instead, they will remain up and running, hitting performance targets. Many other benefits arise as well.

For instance, applications and data can be shifted from point A to point B in the virtualized infrastructure without concern for the technical details of storage complexities. This means that business strategies can be pursued more quickly and easily; the data center becomes more responsive to business needs. It also means that new services can be rolled out with less time and effort, increasing market competitiveness for the organization.

Costs fall for many reasons. One is simply that with higher service uptime, less ongoing maintenance is required. Additionally, SVC can be used to created a tiered storage scheme, in which storage costs are aligned with the business priority of data, applications or services. Such a tiered scheme minimizes waste while also ensuring that performance corresponds with actual demand levels.

Business resilience will often be enhanced as well. Through SVC-driven clustering and data copy services, it becomes easier and simpler to ensure effective system failover, as well as preserving key data—the lifeblood of the organization.

And as storage evolves as a field, SVC evolves in parallel. For instance, emerging storage technologies—such as solid-state disks (SSD), Space-Efficient Virtual Disks (SEV) and N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)—are all already supported by the SVC today. This gives administrators more flexibility in deciding what types of storage they deploy in the infrastructure, and how that storage operates, without increasing complexity.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center: Manage storage across the virtual infrastructure

Of course, for the best business results managing storage in a virtualized infrastructure, best-in-class management tools will be needed.

One extraordinarily full-featured solution is the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. This is actually a suite of different management tools addressing different logical functions, yet seamlessly integrated and linked through a single interface. The result is the best of both worlds: all the features that would come from separate solutions, delivered with all the simplicity you'd expect from one.

Using TPC, administrators can monitor, analyze and automate the management of storage networks, devices, subsystems, file systems, data replicas and data replication processes—all from a central point of command. And in a virtualized infrastructure, TPC becomes particularly appealing thanks to its extensive support for virtual servers.

Performance analysis can be correlated to specific servers, for instance, even though they share a given host or shift from one host to another. Capacity utilization and forecasting features illustrate emerging trends which might otherwise have been difficult to detect. And through monitoring, reporting and alerting functions, TPC can also ensure that virtual servers (and their applications/services) are performing up to target levels—or spur a swift and effective response if they aren't.

TPC is also an excellent tool to use at any stage in the shift to server virtualization—before, during or after.

Before the transition, for instance, TPC can inventory and document hardware as a result of its discovery features—key information needed to make the transition successful. Baseline performance levels can also be established, to detect weak points in the infrastructure, and to serve as point of comparison after the transition is made.

During the migration, TPC's monitoring and reporting features can help ensure the new infrastructure will perform as expected, isolating broken connections in advance of up-and-running production. And afterwards, TPC can make it much easier to forecast capacity requirements, implement and enforce storage policies, monitor performance and even automate certain tasks for exceptional business agility.

Use them both and multiply your business value

While both SVC and TPC are impressive as standalone solutions, it's by combining them that things can get really interesting.

Suppose, for instance, that SVC is controlling a storage tier based on SSD technology. TPC can work in conjunction with SVC to determine exactly how and why that tier is being used, and suggest ways to optimize the tier for business purposes. Subsequently, TPC can serve as the tool required to implement that optimization, by creating scripts that automate SVC-driven data migration transparently—without impacting business services.

Alternately, consider the case of data replicas that SVC generates in order to maximize business resilience. Organizations that have TPC can get even more business value from such replicas by using TPC to track and manage them over time—for instance, by restoring precious data in the event of hardware failure, and in this way safeguarding applications and services against disaster. Or, if the goal is to develop a new disaster recovery process, TPC can be used to test it in advance, ensuring that process will carry out the appropriate tasks in the appropriate manner—long before a real disaster strikes.

TPC can also leverage SVC for key information needed to generate reports. This has the effect of translating real-world IT events into actionable business intelligence.

Among other classes of such information, SVC can deliver configuration change history, current and historical disk utilization, data path monitoring and event notification, and historical performance analysis and trending. Armed with this, TPC can then create more accurate, context-specific reports—which in turn, can inspire new optimization of the infrastructure.

How should organizations go about deploying and utilizing SVC and TPC? IBM recommends that those interested in making the leap to virtualized environments proceed by logical stages:

Set up a test virtualized server environment.
Deploy SVC. Use it to manage storage in the test environment. Gradually shift lower-priority applications into that environment.
Deploy TPC. Use it to integrate management of virtual servers and virtual storage, and link it to SVC in ways that reflect business needs and priorities.
Over time—in parallel with increasing familiarity with these solutions and the new complexities of virtualization—migrate increasingly high-priority business applications into the virtualized environment as well.

Meet the storage requirements of cloud computing architectures

Cloud computing represents a still more advanced way to get business value from SVC and TPC working in concert... though doing so requires a clear understanding of what cloud computing means, and how it should best be used.

The fundamental strength of cloud is not so much a revolutionary new approach to IT architectures as it is an evolutionary improvement in them. Via a private, on-site cloud, services can be created, rolled into production, managed and retired—essentially, their full lifecycles—much more quickly, easily and cost-effectively than through traditional architectures.

In large part, this stems from the fact that clouds leverage virtualization at an exceptionally deep level, then manage it through surprisingly comprehensive automation. In fact, for many services, IT team members need not be directly involved at all; instead, the services can be requisitioned and managed within the existing cloud by business managers themselves.

What's the connection to SVC and TPC? These IBM solutions empower the cloud by supporting storage virtualization and automated management in exactly the ways the cloud needs to work. Should cloud-based services require more storage, they can requisition and receive it from the SVC. Meanwhile, TPC's performance monitoring and policy model can be used to ensure that storage is managed in a comprehensive and, in many cases, wholly automated manner.

The result is a cloud that handles storage in the optimized way it should—benefiting every service that cloud supports, and every user who needs cloud-based services.

Learn more

Contact IBM

Considering a purchase?

Or call us at:
877-426-3774
Priority code:
109HJ03W

Pulse 2010 Virtual Experience

Attend sessions, breakouts and demos and find Pulse assets full of hints and tips, user experiences and key technical content that you can't get anywhere else.