Virtualisation is breaking traditional storage architectures that were never designed for this, according to Gridstore

Traditional storage architectures from over two decades ago are being ‘broken’ by the rise of virtualisation, and businesses need to consider the best ways to optimise performance without breaking the bank. This is according to George Symons, CEO of Gridstore, who will be making the claim at this week’s Flash Memory Summit in the USA.

Symons states at the event: “In order to draw the best benefits of virtualisation, virtual infrastructure is generally deployed using networked shared storage as admin utilities like live migration, failover and workload balancing require it. These solutions are based around storage architectures that were developed decades ago when the computing infrastructure was dominated by a one-to-one relationship between physical servers and their associated storage. When used in virtual computing infrastructure, these traditional solutions do not perform well and cause what is known as the I/O blender effect.

Symons continues: “Businesses often assume that the way to increase performance in this case is to add more storage but this can be very costly, and ironically cancel out the savings made from server consolidation in the first place.

“Those looking to keep costs low by embracing the benefits of virtualisation need to make sure that they have the correct technology in place to be able to make use of it in the most efficient way. The consideration of software-defined storage allows storage resources to be defined, allocated and optimised on a VM by VM basis will ultimately get the best out of evolving landscape of virtualisation,” Symons concludes.

The Flash Memory Summit will take place August 5-7 in Santa Clara, California and will feature seminars, forums, keynotes and sessions from key industry experts.