Despite the potentials of virtualized storage, there is not a definite way to deploy and manage the technology. One of the reasons is the different requirements and offerings differ in use cases, technology requirements, and capabilities. Storage virtualization can streamline management and enhance the use of resources.
Moreover, it also simplifies advanced applications across the storage pool and improves the durability of the older storage systems. When admins organize and manage virtual storage, they must consider four primary factors. A lot of these components are particular to the selected software; however, the below are true across the board:
1. Resiliency and Availability
Storage virtualization should be able to offer highly available, reduce disruptions in solutions, and protect against data loss. It needs redundant hardware across the virtual storage set-up accompanied by wide-ranging data prediction and fault tolerance.
2. Performance
A virtual storage solution must deliver the performance to support the workload of the organization, irrespective of the type of fluctuation. Moreover, the offering must come with features to improve the storage performance while reducing any negative impacts that virtualization causes. Blockchain and virtualization are viewed as a powerful combination to deliver robust performance.
3. Management and Monitoring
Admins need to manage and monitor all elements in the virtual storage infrastructure. The software must offer the control and visibility that admins need to efficiently maintain the system, manage data, perform upgrades, obtain issue alerts, and monitor the storage.
4. Security And Compliance
Irrespective of the type of SDS option or storage virtualization the IT team deploys, the security and compliance must be at the front position. The virtualized storage tool must always protect data and prevent unauthorized access to your storage infrastructure and the data within it.
Components of a Virtualized Storage Management Strategy
Each virtual storage software comes with its dedicated best practice, and the team must depend on the documentation of the vendor to decide the best way to deploy, update and manage the virtual storage. Irrespective of what the IT team opts for its virtual storage, below are some best practices that ensure admins obtain necessary performance and availability.
1. Select the Appropriate Software and Hardware
Whether the IT team is planning a virtual storage deployment or updating the current one, it is imperative to have the right software and hardware. Select hardware, which is software vendor certified to particularly work with the virtual storage.
The offering should also support any driver, software, or firmware versions that the team leverages and avoid irrelevant third-party software installation on supporting servers. Consider for balanced configurations across different storage nodes like the application of the same hardware components and storage protocols.
2. Obtain The Ideal Mix of Storage Resources
Physical storage resources are the foundation for virtual storage and need a balance of performance, cost, and capacity. IT managers must implement all hard-drive disks, all solid-state drives, or an amalgamation of the two in a hybrid configuration. Additionally, the team must also consider the storage technologies to use like serial attached SCSI, serial advanced technology attachment, or non-volatile memory express. Lastly, they must decide the type of quantity of storage controllers.
3. Design for Accessibility And Resiliency
Storage virtualization should offer a high degree of reliability, availability, and fault tolerance. It needs admins to configure software and hardware to ascertain resiliency and uninterrupted services. Hardware choice, RAID type, the number of hosts in a cluster, volume configurations, data protection strategies, and software settings can help provide resiliency. Furthermore, the admins must be able to scale the system, change hardware when required, and perform important upgrades with minimum service disruptions and downtime.
4. Keep Security and Compliance At The Forefront
Virtual storage products generally offer various features to protect the storage configuration. Therefore, you should leverage them but understand the kind of impacts they may have on systems. An offering may back at-rest encryption; however, it is arduous to set up. Moreover, the CPU-intensive encryption process may impact the performance of the application.
5. The Systems Must Be Up to Date
Software vendors offer frequent updates and patches that come with new features, improved operations, enhanced performance, or deal with security issues. Therefore, it is important to apply the updates as soon as they come. Along with virtual storage, it also includes the OS and any supporting software. Make sure that you follow the recommendations of the vendor.
