Last night I was reading Michael Otey's blog entitled Mission Critical Application Virtualization. The timing of this couldn't have been better as I was reviewing my own slides for a webcast I participated in this morning discussing Virtualizing Microsoft workloads along with one of our customers (replay is available if you're interested).
In Michael's blog he talks about many of the same things I was preparing to discuss including that virtualization is no longer just a technology that you may run across when talking to customers but it is an IT staple. Instead of asking, "do you virtualize"? I find myself just assuming and asking, "so what virtualization technology are you running and what do you virtualize".
Michael points out that while performance (or the concern of the impact on performance) has traditionally been the biggest barrier to virtualization but that this really isn't a concern anymore with the advancement in both physical server multi-core CPU and memory scalability as well as the performance improvements in both Hyper-V and vSphere to support up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1TB of RAM.
But of course meeting performance demands doesn't stop with the compute or network layer. To ensure suitable performance especially when consolidating multiple workloads on these high-end servers you need a storage array that can meet the performance demands to handle these workloads but also one that is flexible enough to provide the necessary I/O to the applications that are demanding it at a specific point in time. Michael's blog highlights SAN technologies such as storage tiering and flash storage as technologies that are well suited for virtualized high-performance workloads.
This is what makes EMC positioned as the best storage provider for virtualized workloads. Not only does EMC offer industry leading performance and availability but technologies such as EMC's Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) and EMC's Xtrem flash based products help to ensure applications get the best I\O from the fastest drives in the array while also extending flash technologies to improve performance on the array and even in the physical server.
Want proof? Check out EMC's whitepaper Advanced Multisite Availability for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 where EMC's FAST Cache uses flash drives as an I\O accelerator in the array resulting in significant improvements in both transfers per second and transactions per second with the SQL database.
Still not convinced? How about this EMC Solution entitled Accelerating Microsoft Exchange 2010 Performance with EMC XtremSW Cache where EMC's PCIe flash hardware is deployed in a virtualized Exchange 2010 server improving application performance while reducing latency by working as a local storage device handling read and write transactions using the flash card as a local cache while maintaining a copy of the data on the storage array.
In this example, total IOPS were improved by 26% - a huge improvement when consolidating multiple virtual workloads on less physical infrastructure!
As Michael states, there's no reason not to virtualize your mission critical applications especially when EMC has the technology and the documented solutions to help make it a reality!
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