data-storage-solutions

Storage Virtualisation

Our data virtualisation services remove the traditional blockage in virtual machines and applications accessing data – improving performance and management of your business information.

Virtualising your datacentre systems and applications can dramatically improve performance and reduce costs.  By virtualising your data storage we bring an optimal level of management and performance to how your staff create, access and utilise business information.

Virtualised storage is an important component of achieving performance and productivity gains you desire.  We deliver technologies and services to improve the storage resources of your virtual infrastructure, giving your organisation the ability to:

  • Achieve real gains in storage resource utilisation and flexibilityIntroduce simpler management and updating regardless of storage topology
  • Reduce application downtime and operational monitoring
  • Capitalise on your existing storage infrastructure

Storage in a Non-Virtualised Environment

Traditional IT infrastructures contained servers directly connected to storage systems, either internally or externally within a dedicated device.  This means a server assumes total ownership of a device, with drives coupled to a single server, and sharing storage resources requiring complex cluster file systems or adopting file based NAS (Network Attached Storage). Using block-based storage can also mean dealing with other issues such as drivers, patches and firmware.

Moving to a virtualised environment can lead to potential issues in accessing data residing in internal or external locations as multiple requests from users can slow down access gateways, impacting on user productivity.  Our solution; virtualise storage to maintain the availability and value from the work already undertaken transforming applications and servers.

Virtual storage can utilise different file system formats, including Virtual Machine File System (VFMS) for high performance file systems, and Network File System (NFS) for storage on a NAS device over TCP/IP

Storage Connectivity

Virtualised storage can still support  the common storage interconnects you are likely to use in your organisation, including:

  • Direct-attached storage - Internal or external storage disks or arrays attached to the host through a direct connection instead of a network connection (usually SATA, IDE, EIDE, etc.)
  • Fibre Channel - A high-speed fiber optic based transport protocol used for storage area networks (SANs). Fibre Channel encapsulates SCSI commands on the FC protocol.
  • FCoE - Fibre Channel Over Ethernet. Fibre Channel traffic is encapsulated into Ethernet frames.
  • iSCSI - iSCSI carries SCSI commands over IP networks
  • NAS storage accessed via an IP network.

By virtualising storage, the management and use of data is greatly simplified.  Common drivers and controllers are utilised to ensure a physical disk is seen by the user, while other protocols that may otherwise not be supported by an operating system are usable. Finally, by using multipathing at the server level the need for redundant links and complex configuration across server stacks is removed.