Storage Networks Boosted by Virtualization Technology

Server virtualization is obviously great business for virtualization software vendors, but the surprise is that it's been even better business for data storage vendors, as organizations are spending tons of money to store and back up all their virtual machines.

Server virtualization is the key technology that will shape the future of the data storage industry, according to a recent report on the storage networking market written by Jason Ader and Dmitry Netis, analysts at investment firm William Blair & Co.

"As servers become centralized and virtualized in mainframe-like grids, storage needs to become more distributed and networked," Ader and Netis wrote. For every $1 spent on server virtualization projects, customers spend roughly $2 to $3 on storage, they estimated.

The big challenge for organizations is figuring out how best to back up the operating systems, applications and data they virtualize as environments grow in size and importance.

Vendors confronting the challenge include NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), Veeam, Venyu and Virsto Software.

There are more virtual machines (VMs) — and more mission-critical VMs — to back up, said Anton Gostev, senior product manager at Veeam, a developer of software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and Virtual Infrastructure 3.

"At the same time, there are fewer host resources and available backup windows," said Gostev. "As a result, speed, efficiency, reliability and scalability of backups are more important than ever."

VMware Backup Product Offloads Processing

Many organizations are finding that the backup tool they used in the test lab or with a handful of VMs is no longer adequate as they scale. What they need is an enterprise-strength solution that offloads processing from production hosts. This is VMware's (NYSE: VMW) recommended approach and is especially important if data is compressed,

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.