If the 3PAR saga reflects anything at this point (other than the fact that Dell and HP do indeed have unlimited stockpiles of cash) it’s that storage virtualization and related technologies and services represent a growing area of development, both within the HPC space and in the area of the SMB market.
Enterprises of all sizes are looking to storage virtualization hoping to realize reduced storage costs with the added wish that such a shift will streamline current data management. Some suggest, however, that the offerings in this realm have not matured sufficiently, at least not in comparison to widely-implemented concepts like server virtualization.
The fact that the storage virtualization arena is growing to encompass more vendors and users comes as no surprise since many enterprises are at least getting their feet wet with virtualization of one kind or another. As it stands, however, storage virtualization might not be as enterprise-ready as some would prefer. As Chris A. MacKinnon pointed out today,, “Storage virtualization is a few years behind server virtualization in its maturity cycle, so currently the biggest concern is proving the technology works efficiently.”
MacKinnon went on to note that there are a growing number of developments and innovations that are bringing the virtualization storage market up to speed and more marketable. He states that “Scale-out storage, tiered and virtualized storage, virtualized storage for cloud datacenters, and load balancing are expected to be important to the next stage of storage virtualization”