search engine crawled the Web.
The web site itself may have changed. You can check the current page or check for previous versions at the Internet Archive. Yahoo! is not affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its content.
Fueling Storage Efficiency S
torage virtualization is hot
and with good reason. Many
organizations continue to acquire
large numbers of storage devices to
cope with ever-increasing volumes of
data. While storage networks make
those devices accessible to multiple
servers, they dont manage storage
capacity. As a result, organizations
tend to buy excess capacity to elimi-
nate the risk of any particular disk fill-
ing up.
To understand the concept of stor-
age virtualization, think of a complex
enterprise storage environment as a car
with 20 separate one-gallon gas tanks.
For any trip, the driver would have to
evaluate the capacity of each tank,
determine the most efficient method
for drawing fuel from multiple sources
and constantly monitor 20 different
fuel gauges. Miscalculate, and the car
could stall even if there were plenty
of gas in most of the tanks. In addition,
fueling up would be a tedious, overly
complicated task.
Storage virtualization essentially
puts all your fuel in one big tank. By
providing for the creation of virtual
volumes within the storage network,
it forms a dynamic environment in
which physical storage resources can
be moved and changed rapidly and
non-disruptively. Storage networks can
be used to their potential, permitting
companies to defer investments in
additional storage devices and reduce
administrative costs.
No More Planned
Downtime
Invista, EMCs new network stor-
age virtualization solution, is an inte-
grated hardware and software solution
that makes it easy to move, copy and
migrate data across multiple tiers of
heterogeneous storage arrays. Based on
innovative new technologies, Invista
groups distributed physical storage
devices into a common logical pool.
From that pool, customers can easily
provision and manage their disparate
information resources.
Invista enables organization to
continued on page 2
PRSRT STD
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
Tulsa, OK
Permit No. 2146
UPTIME
EMC Invista drives down cost and complexity of storage management through virtualization.
Fueling Storage Efficiency
Vol. 4 No. 4
EMC Ideal for
Microsoft Exchange
EMC offers Express Solution
for E-mail.
E-mail Archival:
A Federal Case
Regulations and legal
discovery require that
organizations effectively store
and retrieve e-mail.
Intelligent Storage
Impending FAIS standard
expected to enhance SAN
capabilities. reap the benefits of storage virtualiza-
tion, including improved capacity uti-
lization, faster backups and improved
performance. It also helps customers
eliminate planned downtime. Dynamic
volume mobility enables storage
administrators to move storage vol-
umes from one location to another
without application disruption for
normally disruptive processes such as
lease rollovers, technology refreshes,
data movement across multi-tiered het-
erogeneous environments or to
respond to rapidly changing perfor-
mance needs.
Invistas network-based local repli-
cation provides additional flexibility
and choice. For example, businesses
can create additional data copies non-
disruptively for backup, data ware-
housing or other secondary uses.
Because the data is replicated via the
storage network, it can be copied to
and from heterogeneous and tiered
storage arrays.
One of the main reasons for look-
ing at Invista is the ability to move data
and change the infrastructure transpar-
ently to applications and the rest of the
IT operation, said Michael Goode,
director of Storage Services at Nielsen
Media Research.
Easier Administration
Storage administrators can spend
20 percent to 30 percent of their time
on volume-management tasks. Virtual-
ization improves administrator pro-
ductivity by allocating storage across
multiple servers via a graphical inter-
face and allows storage devices to be
removed, upgraded or changed with-
out the need to tell the operating sys-
tem that the storage topology is differ-
ent.
By presenting a virtualized volume
view across multiple heterogeneous
storage devices, Invista enables IT
organizations to significantly reduce
the amount of time spent on these
manual tasks. With centralized net-
work-based volume management in
place, Invista customers can reduce the
repetitive volume management activi-
ties that must occur in the server envi-
ronment today.
Invista enables enterprise cus-
tomers to preserve all of the native per-
formance and software functionality of
the physical storage devices being vir-
tualized. Businesses can opt to virtual-
ize their heterogeneous storage envi-
ronment while continuing to use array-
based replication or other storage soft-
ware functionality currently running
on their storage
systems.
The beau-
ty of EMC
Invista is that it
gives customers
the flexibility to
implement stor-
age virtualiza-
tion as a trans-
parent process
thats additive
and comple-
mentary to their
existing infra-
s t r u c t u r e s ,
while address-
ing very specific
business needs
like non-disruptive operation, said
Mark Lewis, executive vice president
and chief development officer, EMC.
Customers will be able to deploy
Invista in an EMC, IBM, Hitachi or
any other qualified environment, while
also taking advantage of valuable soft-
ware theyve already purchased for
those storage platforms.
Scalable, Open Solution
While some storage technology
providers contend that storage virtual-
ization should be located on in-band
components between the host systems
and the storage devices, EMC believes
in-band architectures can introduce
significant bottlenecks by performing
all of their processing within the data
path. Invistas highly scalable out-of-
band approach places the virtualiza-
tion intelligence in the storage network
to eliminate the impact on server or
application performance. It delivers the
full value of network storage virtual-
ization with the levels of performance,
reliability and integrity required for
deployment in enterprise data centers.
EMC is the only major vendor to
develop a network storage virtualiza-
tion solution designed to run on intelli-
gent SAN switch platforms from the
top three switch vendors. Invista takes
advantage of specialized processing
power resident in
intelligent switch-
es to perform core
storage virtualiza-
tion operations.
Invista is an open
solution that pre-
pares enterprises
for the emergence
of the Fabric
Application Inter-
face Standard
(FAIS) standard. It
provides the foun-
dation for cus-
tomers to take
advantage of net-
work storage vir-
tualization today,
while serving as a platform to deploy
new network storage virtualization
capabilities easily and cost effectively.
EMC views network storage vir-
tualization as a key enabling technolo-
gy to address customer challenges such
as the inability to schedule planned
downtime, the constraints of inflexible
storage infrastructures and the need to
simplify management of complex stor-
age environments, Lewis said. EMC
took the necessary time to develop an
architecture thats completely open and
stateless. For this reason, EMC Invista
eliminates the performance limitations
and data integrity issues associated
with other storage virtualization meth-
ods, and is architected to scale to the
most complex and demanding enter-
prise environments.
2
Sigma UPTIME
Fueling Storage Efficiency
continued from p. 1
The beauty of EMC Invista is
that it gives customers the
flexibility to implement
storage virtualization as a
transparent process thats
additive and complementary
to their existing
infrastructures, while
addressing very specific
business needs like non-
disruptive operation. 3
volume 4 number 4
E
MC offers simple yet powerful
solution to help organizations
drive down the cost and increase
the productivity of their Microsoft
Exchange Server e-mail environments.
The EMC Express Solution for E-Mail
is the first in a series of EMC Express
Solutions, which include packaged
hardware, software and services that
leverage EMCs expertise in informa-
tion lifecycle management (ILM) and
target the business needs of small to
midsize companies.
Using automated policy manage-
ment software, the EMC Express Solu-
tion for E-Mail helps organizations
with hundreds to several thousands of
e-mail users to consolidate and manage
years of e-mail messages on a single net-
worked storage system. By cost-effec-
tively expanding mailbox limits, end-
user productivity improves while
Microsoft Exchange Server storage
total cost of ownership is reduced by up
to 30 percent.
The solution incorporates:
EMC CLARiiON mid-tiered net-
worked storage with Fibre Channel dri-
ves, ATA drives and replication soft-
ware;
EMC Legato EmailXtender Archive
Edition software to expand user mail-
box s