Enterprise IT organizations face increasing business pressures as data volumes continue to grow. Server consolidation, disk capacity and CPU resource management, disaster recovery/data protection, and a general need to reduce costs have all compelled companies to embrace virtualization as a remedy.
Virtualization helps businesses make the most of their existing resources. Organizations that used to rely on a single physical resource in each office, such as a hard disk with a few terabytes of capacity, can now pool those individual resources together into a larger “virtual” hard disk providing hundreds of terabytes of disk space. The disk space that went unused in less data-intensive departments is freed up through virtualization for other departments to use, without the purchase of additional hardware.
Businesses that deploy server virtualization alone, however, are tackling only half of the problem. A well-planned and well-executed strategy encompasses both server virtualization and storage virtualization.
Server Virtualization allows you to:
- Consolidate your hardware resources to reduce costs and increase utilization
- Implement better disaster recovery and application availability solutions
- Optimize the IT infrastructure for flexibility and agility to respond to business needs
Storage Virtualization enhances data availability for virtualized servers, so that you can:
- Meet the high availability requirements driven by your server consolidation
- Provision storage resources dynamically and intelligently, based on business needs
- Protect the data in the virtual data center for disaster recovery and business continuity
- Scale for growth and adapt to changes in business requirements without rearchitecting the storage solution
An open ISCSI SAN from LeftHand allows you to gain continuous access to underlying storage, clone storage volumes and more.