Tue, November 11, 2008 — CIO — Babu Kudaravalli, senior director of IT operations at SXC Health Solutions, knows about the havoc an acquisition can wreak on a company's storage infrastructure. While overseeing National Medical Health Card Systems' (NHMC) IT department, he watched the pharmacy benefits manager grow nearly 40 percent per year, primarily through acquisitions. The result was a mishmash of more than 60 servers that were functioning at 90 percent utilization, impacting performance and creating a constant challenge for storage and system administrators, he recalls.

Fortunately, that had changed by the time SXC acquired NMHC last February. Gone was the hodgepodge of arrays and, in its place, a high-capacity, easy-to-manage storage infrastructure made possible through storage virtualization. "SXC was very impressed," says Kudaravalli, adding that SXC plans to preserve NMHC's storage environment.

But accolades aren't the only reason companies are turning to storage virtualization. Cutting costs, easing management headaches, simplifying data migrations across multiple tiers—these are just a few of the factors pushing them into the arms of vendors including Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Symantec and DataCore Software. A study by research firm TheInfoPro reveals that 35 percent of Fortune 1000 storage organizations are using the technology and plan to expand their investment during the next two years.

Not unlike server virtualization, which simplifies the management of disparate server hardware and operating system platforms, storage virtualization masks the complexities of heterogeneous storage arrays by aggregating them into a centralized structure. And it's earning plenty of fans. But with all the hype surrounding this technology, many CIOs fail to consider the hurdles—from interoperability glitches to deployment snafus—that can greatly impact storage virtualization success.

"In the course of putting [multiple storage devices and arrays] into one consolidated pool, companies risk introducing new problems, like performance issues," warns Greg Schulz, founder of consulting firm StorageIO Group.

Far from Plug-and-Play

Kudaravalli agrees. Today's NMHC storage environment consists of two HP StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Arrays, which supply enterprise- class capacity to applications from a pool of virtualized storage. And two HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays support near-mission-critical applications requiring high availability and midrange capacity. The result is 55 terabytes of virtualized storage. But, Kudaravalli admits that "it took a long while to get there."

For a company to make the most of storage virtualization, a solution must be able to accommodate existing storage hardware, as well as satisfy the requirements of future storage systems. In NMHC's case, Kudaravalli needed a solution that would be compatible with factors including the company's existing servers, host bus adapters, fiber cards, fiber switches, operating systems and multiple business applications.