PRO+ Premium Content/E-Books

When virtual servers became popular, they also introduced a number of storage configuration problems. In many cases, virtualization required that servers for specific applications needed dedicated storage systems with different performance requirements than physical servers. Obtaining that performance often meant overprovisioning, and configuring storage separately for each workload, making for a complex environment. Luckily, a new breed of storage technologies can help reduce those problems for storage and virtualization administrators. Converged infrastructure systems and hyper-converged storage appliances make it far simpler to deploy storage for virtual machines. Converged infrastructure options provide pre-tested and sometimes pre-racked combinations of hardware and software that are set up specifically for virtual environments. Hyper-converged systems take this one step farther by providing the hypervisor, networking, servers and storage packaged in one box. IT professionals are also increasingly moving data to the public cloud to lessen the storage configuration burden. Clouds can provide the same advantages of converged storage options, but have the added benefits of scalability and sometimes cost savings. This E-book will walk storage admins through the benefits of converged, hyper-converged and cloud storage in virtual server environments to help them gain an understanding of how the infrastructure complications are still plaguing many IT professionals today.