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Under pressure of ever-tightening budgets and increasing regulatory requirements for data security and storage, federal sector organizations are working to align information technology investments with mission-focused operational goals. To accomplish this lofty goal, government organizations struggle to overcome the chaos of data overload. Thus, while simultaneously doing more with less, these organizations are seeking new ways to better manage their storage resources. At the same time, industry observers and suppliers point out that it's shortsighted to purchase only inexpensive disk solutions, as this will be detrimental to long-term operational success. Instead, these observers recommend that government organizations invest in storage virtualization and a tiered storage infrastructure. At a basic level, this type of solution 'virtualizes' all storage assets and allows government agencies to manage them — centrally, and more efficiently. Typically, virtualization products support heterogeneous storage devices and can pool disk storage from any supported attached storage platform. 
Storage virtualization would enable government entities to use a single platform to consolidate and simplify storage infrastructures, combining previously separate storage silos and optimizing storage capacity management and planning. This has the potential to lower storage-related operating costs by 15 percent or more over a three-year period, when compared to a single-tiered architecture. Some sources say achieving a 20-to-50 percent reduction in storage-related expenses is not uncommon. Clearly, the reduction in storage costs depends on the number of subsystems consolidated, managed, and modernized to take advantage of virtualization. By virtualizing storage, government agencies and departments also gain the ability to prioritize storage assets and better align them to their operational needs. For example, "most agencies wouldn't use tier 1 storage resources for payroll operations, but on the 28th of each month, the payroll application could migrate from tier 3 to tier 1 to ensure timely completion of employee payments," said Vijay Ramaswamy, Director of Product Marketing, Tiered Storage & Infrastructure Products for Hitachi Data Systems. Aligning storage resources with operational needs is central to the concept of virtualizing storage assets. By choosing this path, federal customers can manage storage from a single centralized platform to ensure optimal performance-based agency goals and service level agreements. Why Virtualize? In both the public and private sectors, organizations are choosing to virtualize storage platforms to gain better control and increase capacity utilization levels. Whether faced with data center consolidation or expansion requirements, storage virtualization technologies enable an organization to lower costs by managing more terabytes using fewer resources. Some organizations run with only a single vendor's storage behind the virtualization engine, while they may mix different classes of disk, such as SATA and Fibre Channel (FC). Data migration features are typically used to migrate storage to a virtualized environment, while applications continue to access the data. "A 'best practices' approach is to use storage virtualization to create tiered storage, making it easier to move data among storage tiers without disrupting applications using the data," Ramaswamy said. In government, the need to virtualize storage is also driven by other factors, according to industry observers such as IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts. Demand for improved government service is one factor. As IDC has reported, these organizations will increasingly turn to technology to gather data from various situations as they happen to more readily evaluate real-time response. Meanwhile, a continued emphasis on security at all levels of government includes the need to better secure access to data. Consolidation is another consideration, because it enables better information sharing and will eventually lower operational costs. While investments in software and services will likely increase in the short term to accomplish these goals, IDC expects the efficiencies gained will lower agency IT spending in the future. Currently, there are several ways to implement storage virtualization – on the host, in the storage area network (SAN) or at the controller. Typically, virtualization redirects an I/O request from a virtual location to a physical location, so data can be moved anywhere within a virtualized storage pool to applications and users. Industry observers such as the Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut, maintain that controller-based virtualization solutions such as the one offered by Hitachi Data Systems work best, especially in heterogeneous storage environments. This is because controller-based virtualization better enables agencies and departments to gain the benefits of virtualization, while leveraging current storage investments, no matter which storage products are already in place. 
Setting an Example Perhaps the biggest advantage delivered by storage virtualization is the ability to more efficiently utilize storage resources. Indeed, in traditional single-tier storage environments, there's a tremendous amount of waste. Storage systems are often provisioned to peak usage, and government organizations may be running out of capacity on some applications, while other platforms languish with excess capacity that sits underused. The University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics (UUHC) in Salt Lake City, for example, was stymied by an inability to migrate data across separate storage platforms. Eliminating "stranded" storage and simplifying storage management were both critical to the University's storage virtualization project. UUHC added the Hitachi TagmaStore® Universal Storage Platform model USP600 to a mix of four Hitachi Thunder 9500™ V Series modular storage systems, along with some older IBM and Sun storage systems that were being phased out. The University began with only 10 terabytes (TB) behind the Universal Storage Platform, and in less than 20 months grew its virtualized capacity to 135TB of Fibre Channel and SATA disk storage. The system provides controller-based, in-band virtualization, supporting both internal (within the virtual storage product cabinet) and externally attached storage. Using this platform, UUHC was able to virtualize its storage infrastructure to support three tiers of storage, including: high-end for critical applications, mid-tier for user and file space, and low-end for in-system replication and disk-to-disk copy. The University has reported that performance has improved by as much as 300 percent for some users since implementing the virtualized storage solution. Primary Benefits Key benefits of implementing a virtualized storage solution such as the Universal Storage Platform, include the following:
Both the Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform and TagmaStore Network Storage Controller offer a unique storage controller-based virtualization technique that masks the underlying complexity of enterprise storage platforms. Virtualizing storage dramatically improves resource utilization while ensuring the availability and performance of the entire storage infrastructure. The Gartner Group maintains that the Hitachi storage platform is on the forefront among virtualization solutions, and is a 'best kept secret' that's gaining traction in all kinds of public and private sector environments. Perhaps this is why several government organizations have already turned to the Hitachi storage solutions, including the agency created to secure the United States from terrorist attacks, which currently operates several petabytes of Hitachi storage. In the federal sector, Hitachi Data Systems offers storage management hardware, software and services through a range of partners including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Vion and others. Because it's storage management offerings are vendoragnostic, Hitachi Data Systems enables customers to buy a solution they can trust will interoperate in a heterogenous storage environment, providing the ability to manage almost any current storage subsystems, matching applications to data for optimized operational performance. |
