Hypervisors driving demand for storage performance

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 10 February 2011 17:41

The growing use of virtualisation is a major reason why organisations need more performance from storage subsystems, according to a major vendor.

The demand for increased storage performance "is really driven by hypervisors," according to Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems. "VMware has taken over like wildfire," he told iTWire.

Mr Yoshida explained that software from companies such as VMware makes it relatively easy to load up a processor in order to make the most of its capacity rather than making do with the relatively low utilisation typically achieved when running a single operating system directly on the hardware.

But running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a processor increases the I/O load, so it is necessary to improve performance in that area. Furthermore, the operation of multiple VMs means that disk I/O becomes increasingly random - individual applications may read files sequentially, but multiple programs running on multiple VMs on one piece of hardware makes life harder for the storage subsystem.

HDS's approach is to use solid state drives (SSDs) or to stripe data across a larger number of hard drives than would otherwise be required. The company also uses automatic load balancing to deliver the necessary performance.

Closer integration also helps. Mr Yoshida noted that VMware provides a range of APIs that allow it to leverage other vendors' strengths.

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