Virtualization Strategies for Storage Optimization:

Assessing and implementing storage strategies in virtual environments

 

In 2008, one of the biggest trends in IT continues to be the deployment of virtualization technology. Most large and mid-sized organizations either already have virtualized environments or are planning a deployment in the near future. The benefits of virtualization – consolidation, ease of management, better partitioning of applications or users, lower costs and energy efficiency – are substantial.

But so is the potential negative impact on your storage infrastructure.

Most flavors of virtualization require support from a storage network, and the gains listed above can be overshadowed by inefficiencies and added complexity that plays havoc with your storage infrastructure.

Attend this free half-day seminar with storage and data center expert Greg Schulz for tips on how to optimize your virtualized environment and your storage infrastructure for optimized and balanced performance, availability and data protection, capacity utilization and energy efficiency.

Delegate seats at this FREE breakfast seminar are extremely limited. To claim your seat, call Amanda Lamb at (508) 621-5574, or apply online.

 

About this Seminar

Virtualization is gaining momentum in IT shops with good reason. The potential for server consolidation, improved provisioning and better asset utilization can make IT operations both more efficient and more cost effective.

But there are also challenges:

- Fully understanding data protection after virtualization of servers, as the amount of data behind the server suddenly is very substantial

-The impact virtualizing your environment has on your storage infrastructure is an afterthought, resulting in changes that are felt throughout your systems and applications

- The potential error for using virtualization exclusively as a means for server consolidation, as IT managers discover that as few as 5-20% of servers are actually candidates for consolidation

- Server virtualization eliminates multiple physical server footprints, however, what about the multiple logical server images that still must be managed?

- Using virtualization to drive up utilization without consideration of performance can result in application bottlenecks

- Simply shifting from tape based to disk based virtual tape backup may only shift or hide bigger issues

- Virtualization can be leveraged to address day-to-day or ongoing operations even where consolidation is not an issue

- Consolidating servers and applications without regard to high availability and fault isolation can result in single points of failure

- Complete data protection requires application and virtualization-aware approaches to insure data integrity and recoverability

- Virtual storage servers can enable seamless and transparent data access by clients during DR or maintenance scenarios

Spend half a day at this seminar, and leave with confidence that your virtualization strategy is taking full advantage of the technology’s advantages, while avoiding the common pitfalls.

Get perspective on the challenges you face from Greg Schulz, plus benefit from the hands-on experience from technology experts from Insight Investments and NetApp as they propose solutions to these common challenges.

 

About Greg Shulz

Founder, Sr. Consulting Analyst for The StorageIO Group

The StorageIO group is a technology analyst and consulting firm founded by storage veteran, author and industry analyst Greg Schulz. Mr. Schulz has worked with Unix, Windows, Mainframe, OpenVMS and other hardware, network, and software environments. Greg has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, storage planner, capacity planner, systems engineer, technologist and storage industry analyst. Mr. Schulz has been involved with various storage related organizations including the computer measurement group (CMG), storage networking industry association (SNIA), RAID advisory board (RAB), and vendor specific user groups, in addition to being the author and illustrator of "Resilient Storage Networks - Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Elsevier)". Greg is a regular contributor to the Storage Decisions conference, SearchStorage.com and Storage magazine.

Register today by calling Amanda Lamb at (508) 621-5574 or applying online.

Insight Investments, Corp.

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for this free half-day seminar