CommVault Details Storage Virtualization Promises and Challenges

Addressing what is rapidly becoming known in the storage management industry as “the V-word,” CommVault Systems today released a white paper and glossary of storage management terms detailing both the benefits and limitations of storage virtualization technology.

“Virtualization itself is not exactly a new concept,” commented Larry Cormier, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development and author of the white paper. “The basic technique dates back to the seventies in both disk and tape storage. Transferring this technique to the open systems world, however, is posing a number of challenges for enterprise IT management. While most industry discussion of virtualization currently centers on the SAN, at CommVault we believe a broader enterprise view is necessary in order for virtualization to come into its own and help IT management achieve simplified and streamlined storage management.”

The white paper, “Seeing the Forest, Not the Trees,” is available for download at http://www.commvault.com/mk/get/virtualization and discusses various virtualization techniques for hosts, storage subsystems, in-band systems, out-of-band redirectors and storage domain managers.

“Storage administrators are cracking under the load of managing myriad storage devices and servers across multiple enterprise sites,” continued Cormier. “A logical and unified view of such networks is possible, but IT management should be aware of the choices and options available to them as they pursue this goal. We’ve attempted to provide a helpful overview of some of these options in our current white paper.”