By Edgardo Lopez

In these hard economic times, so many articles are already out there about how to bring down the costs of storage infrastructures, but few of them actually describe how to design a flexible and adaptive infrastructure that facilitates these potential savings and streamline operations to improve productivity  

A recently published research paper by IDC titled "The Business Value of Storage Virtualization: Scaling the Storage Solution; Leveraging the Storage Investments" offers a refreshing new perspective. The authors present an IT evolution framework, describing how organization can evolve their infrastructure to enable them get more out of the infrastructure they already have.  They show how by integrating server and storage virtualization technologies, IT organizations can significantly boost storage asset utilization while simplifying operations and improving efficiency.  Findings show that asset utilization can be increased by up to 70%, cost of future system purchases can be decreased by as much as 50% and how provisioning and capacity expansion across heterogeneous systems can be  significantly simplified

Today, I would like to begin a discussion how the HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform or SVSP can be used to implement a storage infrastructure that produces the benefits described in the paper. 

The SVSP is a network-based storage virtualization solution that aggregates capacity from multiple SAN attached FC arrays (HP or non-HP), and creates pools of virtual storage that can now be easily provisioned to satisfy the dynamic demands of virtual and physical servers. In addition, the SVSP provide a comprehensive set of data services that help firms streamline operation, and improve efficiency including: volume management, thin provisioning, non-disruptive data migration, copy services (clones and snapshots) and local and remote mirroring.  They are the key to address a set of important use cases that we will describe in more detail in future postings.  They are:

• Storage Consolidation and Centralized Management
• Non-disruptive Data Migrations
• Dynamic Tiered Storage infrastructures
• Rapid Application Recovery
• Efficient Application Testing & Development
• Cost Effective Disaster Recovery

For more details see:  www.hp.com/go/svsp

(Editor's note: Edgardo is the Product Marketing Manager for the SVSP.  He will be talking about the HP StorageWorks SVSP and it's use cases in several upcoming posts.  Don't forget that you can follow HP StorageWorks on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy).