The Latest Jargon: Provisioning

That shift is no coincidence. It's the result of a natural evolution from creating a pool of heterogeneous storage to automating the use of that pool.

In the past couple of years, vendors and industry analysts have been telling us about the importance of virtualizing storage, i.e. connecting the capacity of a single array or multiple arrays in such a way that the entire capacity can be treated as one large pool of storage. From there, chunks of capacity can be sliced and diced for connection to one or more servers as needed.

Virtualization can be done three ways. The capacity of a single array can be virtualized internally for connection to multiple servers, or the capacities of multiple arrays can be pooled for access via an appliance. In addition, the technology that connects users to pooled storage can exist on the SAN fabric itself for SAN-wide virtualization.

A menagerie of startups are now offering virtualization software and appliances, and even the big boys are starting to enter this space. For now, Hewlett-Packard appears to have grabbed the high ground with its EVA array with internal virtualization, CASA appliance and deal to put VersaStor technology on Brocade switches later this year.

Solution providers that specialize in storage are already deploying their first virtualized storage pools. However, they say they're still in the preaching mode because the concept of virtualization has yet to catch on at the customer level.

Yet even as virtualization creeps into the consciousness of the IT market, others are whispering a new buzzword: storage provisioning.

Under the concept of storage provisioning, once a pool of storage has been virtualized, slices of it can be automatically assigned to specific servers or tasks as needed. Excess or unused capacity also can be released back to the pool automatically. The storage administrator's main job, then, would be to set provisioning policies and add new hard drives as capacity utilization rates increase.

At this point, we're still in the early days of automated storage provisioning, and it's too early to pick a winner. But if you ever get a chance to see a demo of Sun's N1 architecture, you'll see what storage provisioning (and server provisioning, for that matter) should look like.

If you haven't started working with storage virtualization yet, don't worry. You haven't missed the boat. Few of your customers have heard the term, and there likely will be a long period of education before the technology catches on.

Still, it's time to start learning about storage virtualization. Many data centers have processes that are maxed out on storage utilization or bear tons of unused capacity. Virtualization is one way to leverage that unused capacity for other applications. What's more, today's tight IT budgets aren't expected to loosen anytime soon. With virtualization, solution providers can add inexpensive arrays to back up or replace more expensive models.

So there's some food for thought. If nothing else, when your customers ask you about virtualization this year and automatic provisioning next year, you'll at least be able to answer their questions.

Still reading and writing,
Joseph F. Kovar

JOSEPH F. KOVAR is the storage editor for CRN.