Delivering quality of service (QoS) is as important as living within your budget. Existing virtual server storage options force you to pick one or the other.
You can optimize hardware utilization and capital spending, if your users like unpredictable performance and you’re happy with complex storage management. Unfortunately, you’ll also run into hidden operating costs, in the form of increased administrative workloads.
Or you could optimize performance and reliability, if you can get approval to buy more – and more – high-end storage arrays loaded with software licenses.
Meet QoS requirements. Keep the budget trim. Pick one.
When all else fails, get a bigger hammer
Many of the storage issues in server virtualization can be handled by throwing enough hardware and money at the problem. A cruel paradox of server virtualization is that the more we commoditize servers – to the great benefit of enterprise and cloud data centers – the more we have to invest in mainframe-style storage to take advantage of the promise of virtual servers.
Want to dynamically allocate server workloads? No problem, you’ll just need a bulge bracket SAN. Want to deal with the capacity bloat caused by VM sprawl? Just buy a higher end storage system, load it up with expensive software features, oh, and you’ll need more specialized cache in the array.
The alternative is to scale back on deployment of virtualization. Don’t fully load your servers, so you get a lower consolidation ratio. Or leave the I/O intensive apps on physical servers. Certainly an option, but if the obstacles were removed, IT professionals would virtualize a lot more applications.
Sometimes, overprovisioning is acceptable. This time-honored technique is standard in an IT architect’s toolkit. But any time IT pros systematically solve problems by overprovisioning, there’s an opportunity to invent a more clever solution. Come to think of it, that’s how we got server virtualization in the first place.
There ought to be a better alternative than compromise, and we're working to deliver it. We have a bold, different approach.
