Aberdeen Group Highlights Need for Storage Virtualization Standards

The Aberdeen Group, a market analysis and positioning services firm, today stated in a recent report that creating standards for storage virtualization would drive adoption because of benefits it would deliver to users. This research is a result of Aberdeen’s Storage and Storage Management practice, which covers emerging and established companies in storage networking and management, and analyzes marketing, technology, and business trends.

“Virtualization solutions implemented at the host computer or storage network level ignore key hardware and software storage service features of the storage subsystems that they manage,” says Dan Tanner, Senior Analyst at Aberdeen Group. “Virtualization based at the disk subsystem allows storage pooling as well as the use of key storage attributes and storage subsystem vendor software services. However, it would preclude any use of storage from other vendors or file-based operations that require host computer participation.”

Aberdeen research indicates that virtualization standards that would place attribute and/or file information in a storage virtualization standard framework could allow users to cut storage administration costs, improve per performance and security, and provide direct file control. Typical virtualization solutions do not store information; much less aid the administrator in using it. That is the case because no quality of service (QoS) normalization standards, measurement metrics or calibration benchmarks exist.