Stop storage costs undermining your virtualisation ROI

As consolidation of datacentres and virtualisation sweeps through IT departments problems have emerged.

Alongside the management problems of virtual server sprawl is growing concern at the costs associated with storage area networks that come with virtualisation.

Analyst group Forrester noted in a recent paper, Network Your VMs To Shared Storage With Ethernet, “One of the top complaints we hear from our clients trying to save money with server virtualisation is the cost of the Fibre Channel SANs.

“Although you're saving money by consolidating server hardware, your FC SAN is now eating a disproportionate part of your hardware budget.”

According to Forrester, “The cost advantage of iSCSI is so significant in terms of server side and switch network costs that you owe it to your budget to determine which applications would be a good fit for this technology.”

If you are responsible for virtualisation strategy and want advice on how to proceed, our sister title, CIO UK, is running a web seminar today, 19 February at 3.00 debating some of these issues.

HP's Dave Barnes, is a leading authority on iSCSI SANsl and will be talking with analyst Tony Lock from Freeform Dynamics on the problems faced by companies moving to virtualise their storage and how to overcome them.

The webinar will also examine how Oxford University achieved efficiencies through virtualisation. It did this by combining two business units within the university to build a resilient infrastructure cost effectively.

The webinar can be found by logging into CIO and is open to all.