Business IT Support

WMware Reformulates the Data Storage Decision
It appears that IT Consulting providers everywhere will be rethinking their approach to data storage designs with the addition of a slew of new features in the vSphere 5. Now it is possible to share storage seamlessly across different servers as if it was a single drive. This means that the traditional Storage Array will be meeting the end of it’s life cycle to be replaced by a Private Cloud Concept enabling users to pool their data in virtual, easily transferable, and reliably replicated drives. This has significant bearing for IT support providers for small business because now they have a capability to deliver to their clients capacity and capability to run large applications at much lower costs of data storage and distribution.

Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) is a feature that aggregates storage among different and distributed data volumes into a single pool. SDRS provides load balancing for data storage and traffic to ensure optimum space allocation and I/O bottleneck avoidance.  Further features include Policy Based Management, Profile Driver Storage through a user defined policy, and auto deploy. This level of data pooling combined with customization of policy and control allow a new level of scalability for a fraction of the cost of comparable configurations prior to vSphere 5.  

Just to understand the  the capability of this product we can look at it’s maximum technical envelop, with includes the ability to generate up to:

• 32 Virtual CPUs

• 1 TB of Memory

• 1 Million I/O Operations Per Second in Network Throughput

This ability to support large applications through robust processing power allows for:

• Simplification of IT Infrastructure

• Reduced Costs of Equipment

• Reduced Costs of IT Consulting

• Capacity to Process More Data Faster

• Increased Flexibility of Data Storage

• Increased Redundancy and Backup of Data

• Reduced Cost of Data Storage and Backup

• Increase in Functional Use of Application Data

vSphere 5 features such as VAAI, VASA, SDRS, Storage vMotion enable it to be a comprehensive Cloud solution that includes not just the server environment, but the reason for the server’s existence, its data. Computer network support professionals are at the forefront of the deployment and maintenance of virtualization products and need to keep pace with the rapid expansion in data storage and redundancy that vSphere has created.

The New Trend
Now that this creation has been released, we foresee an acceleration of transition to virtual storage methodology, starting with large enterprises. vSphere 5’s data storage features are designed primarily for the large enterprise / data center environments. This technology will not stop there and will fairly quickly make its way toward the lower segments of IT services, into small business. It would be wise for the CIOs to direct their IT support for small business providers to analyze their data storage processes and prepare for the future.  

Complete Services
VMware offers multiple complementary services that allow  IT Consulting providers  to deliver complete and comprehensive virtualization solutions that include not only cloud computing itself, but also data storage control, redundancy control, and security control. vShield App with data security, for example, brings protection from network based attacks for sensitive data. This control for IT support for small business providers control and flexibility that their customer will demand more and more now that the potential is there.