IBM’s Storage Hypervisor concept is the best news since server-less back-up, and easier to understand. Thanks to the popularity of server virtualization, most business folks have some idea of what a hypervisor can do but a storage hypervisor has the potential to be much more transformative...

1. Why IBM’s Storage Hypervisor is an Excellent Idea
By Anne MacFarland, MacFarland Consulting
September 2011
IBM’s Storage Hypervisor concept is the best news since server-less back-up, and easier to understand.
Thanks to the popularity of server virtualization, most business folks have some idea of what a
hypervisor can do but a storage hypervisor has the potential to be much more transformative.
Storage Virtualization, by itself, has been a hard sell for anything outside of very large or data rich
organizations. There are a lot more particulars to be virtualized than in server virtualization (which has,
to date, been segregated by platform). But now, the time is at hand. Data access scenarios have been
complicated by situational apps that feed from a database or data warehouse. New data sources beg to
be introduced – but may be untrusted. Business data is often at least somewhat confidential and if kept
for a long time, it is expensive to store. A hypervisor addresses these kinds of issues.
IBM’s Storage Hypervisor is a both a storage virtualization (IBM SAN Volume Controller) and storage
virtualization management (Tivoli Storage Productivity Center) platform that uses IBM’s Integrated
Service Management paradigm. This should help avoid the flurry of concerns about management that
accompanied the introduction of server virtualization. The service approach offers a way to standardize
storage management routines such as LUN allocation by using a smallish set of templates and thin
provisioning to give applications what they think they need.
Two aspects of the Storage Hypervisor make it particularly compelling:
Mobility
Virtual Machine mobility only came a couple of years after launch for VMware virtual machines and
other forms of virtualization, but it quickly became popular. For storage, mobility has always been a
really big deal, and usually hard to do. A storage hypervisor supports many options that are less process-
bound than previous approaches. In routine operations, it provides a simple way to avoid application
outages when infrastructures must be swapped out or upgraded. In addition, for reduced latency of
distributed operations, the storage hypervisor can accessorize caching with something more flexible
than a File Transfer Protocol – which is only for files. Note that, for now, the IBM Storage Hypervisor
works at the block level but an IBM spokesman has indicated that other granularities, such as file level
or objects, could be supported in the future.
On a larger scale, hypervisor-managed mobility gives data center owners an extra layer of protection
from flood or hurricane by moving data and applications (which are also data) to another physical
location for what might be called preemptive disaster avoidance. As more businesses use mobile
©2011 MacFarland Consulting
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2. devices as their end points, this gives new meaning to the concept of business continuity. And, since
IBM’s Tivoli Storage Productivity Center can manage a wide range of storage arrays, the freedom to
move data gives customers more leverage against all vendors, including IBM. The only thing missing is a
name for these data payloads. Storoids is perhaps too topical in challenging ways.
Services Catalog
In the long run, the use of a services catalog expands the evolvability of a data center’s storage strategy
and promotes changing the economics of storage in the following ways:
 Pay-per-use services and automated provisioning reduce the extent and complexity of IT storage
managers’ duties. Together with the mobility of stored data, the self-service mode supports a
wide range of business data strategies.
 A catalog creates an opportunity to set and evolve policies about where and for how long data
and information is to be stored to address both changing regulations and changing market
dynamics.
 Publicly available information and data can be stored on clouds. If it has competitive value, it
can be masked, encrypted, sharded, or otherwise anonymized.
 Infrequently used business data with recognizable patterns of occasional use can be moved to
cheap storage (such as tape) and restaged. As an example, policies for end-of-quarter-events, as
part of the service catalog, could assure completeness of restaging even as new requirements
are imposed (see second bullet).
 Disciplined replication, migration and data health checks can assure that that long term data is
protected and readable. Destruction policies should be used to minimize corporate costs and
risks.
 Rebuild time can be tailored, by replication strategies, to the nature of the data itself.
Conclusions
It is always good to contemplate how to make business use of technology more affordable. With its
Storage Hypervisor, IBM has introduced a lot of ways to approach this goal with a single concept that,
over time, can take both cost and risk out of IT operations. Think about it.
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