In the summer of 1995, I was in Phil Soran's basement along with John Guider trying to create a business plan that we could execute together. That's when the epiphany came. What if we could aggregate storage resources in one place, offer up the performance of the entire storage pool for any server, and along the way get rid of a bunch of extra hardware? The idea became virtualized storage and the start of a storage company that we eventually sold in 2000 prior to founding Compellent. Since then the notion of storage virtualization, doing a lot more with a lot less, has been improved upon by us and the industry.
After virtualizing your data center, you could have one-tenth of the hardware that you had before, and you are able to use the remaining hardware a lot more efficiently. That's the level of efficiency end users are going to need in today's market. InformationWeek cited an HP survey that says one-third of enterprise data centers will not be able to meet the demands put upon them in the next 2 to 5 years.
Server virtualization solutions, such as Citrix , Virtual Iron and VMware, all have their strong points and Compellent, because of our storage virtualization, works seamlessly with them all. Today, Microsoft announced the release candidate for Hyper-V is ready. Here's what we had to say about it.
When companies deploy storage and server systems the old fashioned, non-virtualized way, they are wasting resources. How can you "economize" your data center—get more out of the existing infrastructure instead of having to add more power, cooling or space? The simple answer is: virtualize your storage first, and then virtualize your servers. Why virtualize storage first? It's extremely difficult to virtualize servers and manage them if your virtual machines are hosted on hardware with internal disk drives or directly attached to storage.
The testing on Hyper-V continues (many of our channel partners have already been working with the beta) and the market should be excited about the clarity that Microsoft is bringing to its virtualization strategy. Technology choice for removing extra hardware and aggregating resources is worth getting excited about.