Implications of storage virtualization for SMB

• Author: Adriana Barnoschi
• Position: Associate Professor, Ph.D., Social and Administrative Sciences Faculty, “Nicolae Titulescu” University.
• Pages: 546-554

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Introduction

PC storage capacity has grown; users have stored more and more data on their machines, being the primary targets of attackers. So, companies need to backup their information in order to limit data loss and people started to think about disaster recovery. In other words, companies need to stay in business and people are ware of the value of lost data.

I achieved this conclusion by collecting data about natural and human inducted disasters correlated with business process, by studying different points of view of IT experts in storage network solutions for consolidation, by judging from the laws and standards addressed to BCP for improving an organization's information security, by analyzing disaster survival statistics, by making the choices for storage systems from SMB market.

I collected statistical data from analysts of IDC, of Forester Research Inc., of famous companies and I selected the ideas concerning the promised benefits of virtualization technology. I was thinking it’s important to know about their work and performances, not just because their word does matter, but their experience facilitates us at storage management into IT departments, it helps us to well-formulate the goals of our projects and business and it contribute to state the metrics of software quality.

The paper is organized as follows:

In sections 2 and 3, I give an overview of virtualization that contains a short history of this technology [1, 9], preferred definitions of concepts [2, 6] and one simple description of host/guest paradigm from the base of virtual machines [4, 5, 6].

Section 4 presents the goals of virtualization when it is used to put into practice a wide range of applications and the benefits of desktop virtualization for SMEs, since this technology has become so popular in storage management.

The section 5 discus about how important is the impact of the virtualization process on day-to-day security management.

Section 6 tells us what disaster continuity planning (DRP) is; why virtualization in a disaster recovery environment is very high on the managers’ list; what the gain of using virtualization in DR is? It is important to understand that business continuity planning (BCP) is aPage 547 methodology and backup is a process. The logistical plan is called a Business Continuity Plan. DRP is a part of BCP. That’s why, when I design a disaster recovery plan I have to go through the methodology phases.

The last section summarizes the contributions of this paper and discusses for future work.

Literature review of virtualization

The technology that has created virtual instances of operating systems has been around in one form or another for years, and has been generally approved into the industries in which top priorities are costs and mobility.

The idea dates rear to the days of mainframes and workstations, a model that required all of the computing to be done on the mainframe with the results of the calculations then displayed on the terminal. This multi-user, time-sharing model maximized utilization of the mainframe’s resources simultaneously. It was the efficient standard for years, up through the beginning of minicomputers such as the VAX and PDP.

The idea of virtualization in computing systems is to add a layer of abstraction between two layers in that computer system [1]. This layer allows reducing the management reliance on complicated elements, like building new servers or deploying new applications, while also enabling transiency of the underlying virtualized elements:

Virtualization refers to the pooling of IT resources in a way that masks the physical nature and boundaries of those resources from resource users. In more concrete terms, virtualization is the decoupling of software from hardware. It is the abstracting of the software from the underlying implementation [1].

Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. Server virtualization means the ability that allows multiple independent operating systems to run on the same hardware at the same time.

Virtualization software runs like an application on a computer, separate from the operating system and it avoids hardware and software incompatibility problems. Because the software runs separately from the OS, the different versions of operating systems or other applications can run at the same time [3].

This, along with the need to reduce the number of physical servers in data centers to save money on hardware and power costs, has led to the current attraction with server and desktop virtualization. Today, vendors are building hardware and software platforms that can deliver virtualization solutions at near-native performance.

The recent rush of interest in virtualization has meant large business for vendors like Sun, IBM and Novell, as well as a host of smaller vendors, who sell virtualization software and services. Much of the business these companies have seen so far has been in the data center as part of server consolidation projects [5].

Theoretical Background

There are three popular approaches to server virtualization [3, 6]:

1. The virtual machine model,

2. The paravirtual machine model, and

3. Virtualization at the operating system (OS) layer.

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Moving up from the bottom there is the hardware layer, followed by the operating system and finally the applications.

Virtualization is being widely embraced by IT industry and smaller organizations are now looking to make use of this technology. This is a resulting in an increased number of product offering as vendors compete to capture a share of emerging SMB market. This reduces a major obstacle to deploying virtualization at the SMB level: cost.

Virtual machines are based on the host/guest paradigm. [3, 6] Each guest runs on a virtual imitation of the hardware layer. This approach allows the guest operating system to run without modifications. It also allows the administrator to...