Adopting storage virtualization technologies can deliver significant benefits, but will feature multiple challenges and risks. The greatest risk will be social: cohering an organization’s disparate views of storage requirements and performance attributes into a common set of capabilities that can be structured as storage services to be delivered through virtualization. The metadata management technologies and operational/administrative practices adopted will be the real lynchpins to storage virtualization success, eclipsing any hardware-related value proposition. Often, IT organizations default to the control processes and metadata dictated by a product set’s management software; that’s the easiest path to exploiting products. However, in the case of storage virtualization, it’s also the certain path to long-term vendor lock-in. To avoid onerous long-term dependencies on one or another storage virtualization path, users must establish independent rules, roles, responsibilities, and data structures that can accommodate multiple storage virtualization strategies, and not constrain themselves to "out-of-the-box," implied knowledge.
Action Item: To remain in control of storage resources under storage virtualization routines, users must emphasize the transfer of knowledge about storage virtualization metadata and practices over the transfer of products, either hardware or software.
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