Legacy Storage Not Playing Nice with Virtualisation

By Greg McNevin

September 17, 2008: A new survey from Pillar Data Systems has found that while server virtualisation has proven robust despite the economic downturn, the benefits of going virtual have often been wiped out by legacy storage systems.

Pillar Data says that while IT professionals recognise the potentially massive cost savings associated with a virtualised servers, the demand the put on legacy storage systems is mitigating or altogether eliminating savings due to the extra storage needed to offset the performance and utilisation degradation that occurs when traditional storage systems are used in virtual environments.

The survey canvassed upwards of 1000 users, asking not only which virtual technologies they are deploying, but what they are looking for in terms of a storage system. 50 percent noted that ease of management and performance were the most important features they needed, however, according to Pillar an undercurrent during its discussions was that additional storage capacity had to be purchased to alleviate the utilisation and performance degradation.

Pillar claims that problems typically occur when virtual machine performance is hindered by a server-to-storage I/O bottleneck, saying that traditional storage architectures cannot effectively manage the random I/O patterns created by virtual machines.

This is, according to Pillar, causing many organisations to spend more, as they had to double the amount of storage in order to alleviate the bottlenecks and utilisation issues.

The company says that in order to realise the benefits of a virtualised infrastructure, data centres require next-generation storage systems designed to compliment virtual server environments.

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