Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president, and chief executive officer, at eG Innovations (www.eginnovations.com), says:

Why is storage virtualization important?

Just like server virtualization, storage virtualization is aimed at better utilization of existing resources, presenting a single consolidated view across diverse storage resources. When used effectively, storage virtualization will yield cost savings and result in better utilization of existing resources. Given the tight budgets today, getting more out of your existing hardware capabilities is of great interest to all enterprises. Server virtualization has proven to be of value to large and small enterprises alike. Storage virtualization will be similar. In fact, one could even argue that SMEs use virtualization for cost savings, whereas large enterprises use virtualization more for the higher reliability, agility, and responsiveness that virtualization offers. Industry surveys have indicated that capacity utilization for disk devices is at 30-50%, which is very poor. The root-cause of poor utilization is the way in which storage is bound to hosts. Storage virtualization promises to get rid of this static allocation of storage to hosts.

While SAN/NAS configurations typically are deployed and managed as stand-alone resources separate from the core enterprise IT infrastructure, virtualized storage must be more tightly integrated within an organization’s virtualized server and desktop environments. To do that, users will need a monitoring tool able to manage and correlate performance of storage resources in concert with VMs and desktop users in order to quickly troubleshoot any performance issues and identify the root cause of a problem within the overall virtualized environment.