Virtual environments – the storage hogs!
One of the key findings from a Gartner report from late last year, (Virtual Machines and Market Share Through 2012) stated that ‘by year-end 2010, enterprises with 100 to 999 employees will have a higher penetration of virtual machines deployed than the Global 500. Concurrently, there will be a growing percentage of small businesses that leverage virtual machines provided by cloud-computing service providers; this will become a major trend in three to five years.’
Why do I bring this up?
Deduplication technology within primary storage continues to be driven mostly by the need to deal with the storage bloat created by virtual environments. If mid-size enterprises begin to look to cloud offerings to deliver their virtual environments, these providers better make sure the storage they’re deploying has built-in deduplication technology or they’ll put themselves out of business!
Let’s look at why virtual environments are such storage hogs. First, I’ll look at virtual servers. Most organizations start out with a golden set of virtual server images. From here, anytime a new request comes in for a server, they deploy another copy of that image and then it gets customized from there.
Let’s look at these images. Every one has the same operating system and the same basic applications. That means 80-90% of that image is duplicated in every image! Think of the savings you can gain by implementing deduplication technology on that storage. Also, within these images there is typically a ton of empty space (e.g. within VMware VMDKs). These also are great for dedupe! So, before you even deploy the image and accumulate new data, you’re way ahead of the curve.
Going forward, you need to deploy service packs to all those different images. Again, another great opportunity for dedupe. This doesn’t even take into account the actual data, which can potentially be highly duplicated as well (depending on the use case). This is why we’ve seen dedupe rates as high as 100:1! Wouldn’t you love to be able to store 100TB of information in 1TB of physical storage?
In my next post, I’ll take this one step further and look at virtual desktops.