Virtualisation vs. Storage: a timeline of transformation

past 10 years or so. However, the term ‘virtualisation’ was actually coined in the 1960s, and IT teams had been deploying the technology before man had even set foot on the moon. The first hypervisor was installed in 1967, and the first versions of virtual machines weren’t far off either. This growth has only taken off from there, with server workloads doubling in the past four years – showing no signs of slowing down.

Looking back

Storage was also evolving rapidly alongside virtualisation. 1990 marked the arrival of the first disk array with integrated cache for the mainframe – igniting a billion-pound market for disk-centric block storage. The versatility of block level storage made it usable for almost any kind of application, including file storage, database storage and virtual machine file system volumes.

With the digitalisation of the masses and the resultant explosion in data from digital cameras, camcorders, MPs, laptops and smartphones, file storage became more attractive because most users only needed a simple centralised place to store files and folders. In addition, NAS devices that save files on a file level provide a lot of space at a much lower cost than the more complex block storage.

The limitations of block and file storage technologies were exposed by the arrival of server virtualisation as a mainstream technology in the enterprise and the rise of cloud technology. Designed for a physical world decades before the arrival of virtualisation, block and file storage were ill-equipped to support virtualisation. Virtual environments generate far more random I/O patterns than physical ones which can seriously choke hard disk storage. While servers can support upwards of tens of thousands of virtual servers, each generating its own I/O stream, disk-centric storage can’t keep up. To solve the problem, along came flash storage as a means to match the need for higher I/Os. Offering lower latencies, high density and lower power consumption, the implantation of flash helped solve the storage tailback, albeit temporarily. But while flash can put a lot of IOPS at an organisation’s disposal, it can only do so if it is put to work in the right places.

Present day

In an increasingly virtualised data centre, the only way to improve performance in the long term is to have VM level visibility as well as VM level manageability. VM-aware storage (VAS) addresses the mismatch between storage and virtualisation. It offers direct visibility into VMs, enabling VM-level analytics that replaces guesswork with precision and automation, while eliminating the root cause of storage pain. With VM-level visibility, storage admins can help eliminate planning and complex troubleshooting by providing control, insight and agility. End-to-end visibility shows latency break down across the host, network and storage, allowing users to solve problems in a few clicks.

Because it is built for virtualised applications, VAS reestablishes a 1:1 mapping between application VMs and their storage, stripping out the complexity of LUNs and volumes with multiple conflicting VMs. As it is application-aware, VAS natively understands and integrates with the applications in a virtual infrastructure. Instead of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs, or other legacy storage objects, VAS uses virtual machine abstractions, such as VMs and virtual disks. Data management operations, such as snapshots, clones, and replication, are at the VM level. This removes the problem of “noisy neighbours” on traditional LUNs where a VM becomes overly demanding or goes rogue, ensuring there is no conflict over resourcing or policies.

The future is upon us

Whether we like it or not, technology is moving forward at an astonishing rate. With this in mind, VAS is the only storage solution built for the future. With predictability, scalability, slashed costs and improved performance by as much as 10x, VM-aware storage will move with the times.