Virtualization Wish List

The Lone Sysadmin is not alone in his Storage Virtualization wish list. I agree with some of the things he says and Brian from Steriod.com points out items 1 and 2 are a mix between virtualization and site resiliency. EMC does SRDF/CE for site resiliency, HP, and HDS have their solutions as well.

Item number 3? Yeah I hope they listen, we need better GUIs!!

The interesting part is item number 4….

To really have your data moved around automatically, there needs to be somewhere to move it to. That is the problem. For a company to purchase the capacity to dynamically support all of their applications performance needs, they would need to purchase the capacity more then once over. At a time where most companies are cutting costs and asking for Thin Provisioning, enabling technology to automatically move applications to less used disks is a very hard sell. Don’t get me wrong, if companies want to buy more storage then they need, that is great. But if a company wants to be smart about it then they will lay out their high performance applications like SQL, Oracle, Exchange, etc and then look at how they can fit in their file servers and the like. Automatically moving the data-warehouse onto the quiet spindles that happen to support quarter end bookkeeping could result in a serious problem.