But as sensible as the move to a SAN might appear from an economic aspect, this did not solve the problem of the capacity bottlenecks. "The redundant design of the booting procedures for our 30 servers alone would take up the space of 60 disks each with 36 gigabytes although only a fraction is required for the operation," explains Andreas Hurst, head of the data processing department at the City of Pforzheim. "The rest of the storage lies unused and cannot be readily allocated to other servers whose pool quota in the SAN is running low." He says requests for increased capacities come in thick and fast from the specialist technical areas in particular, for example, for plans and aerial photos in digital form: "It's not unusual to receive inquiries for 50 gigabytes more storage," he says.
Unused SAN resources are another everyday concern for storage system administrators. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) estimates that the average utilization of storage systems ranges from just 35 percent to a maximum of 50 percent. The storage space is available -- it's just in the wrong place.
Enter virtualization: a hot topic in the industry that aims to solve this problem of under utilization by distributing the disk space actually available in such a way as to meet the requirements (see Virtual Reality?).
In this context, a number of physical storage devices are seen as one or just a few logical storage resources, or "logical volumes." The host server also sees the logical (virtual) units as normal SCSI disks. The virtual drives can be adapted to the user's needs in terms of size, speed and failsafe security -- without any downtime, so the virtualization vendors claim.
All the configuration changes are carried out online without halting the server or applications. The user continues to work with his or her own logical volume and the data contained in it. Sounds like a dream, right?
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
