All Virtual is Not Enough; Managing Physical, Virtual, Old and New is Real World

Yes, we think the “all or nothing” proposition offered by vendors that can’t address both the virtual and physical world is a mistake, and an expensive one at that. Virtualization and Cloud computing comes with an assumption that it is better to replace your existing investments in servers and storage and start over to meet the higher demands for performance and availability. DataCore sees this as a major obstacle and has thus designed its storage hypervisor to work across existing storage investments; it improves and supplements them with a powerful feature set. Managing both the physical and virtual and the mix of old and new platforms and device types cannot be ignored.

It is interesting to note the large number of new vendors that have jumped on the pure ‘all virtual’ model and have designed their solutions solely to address the virtual world. They do not deal with managing physical devices or support migrating from one device type to another, or support migrating back and forth between physical and virtual environments.

These virtualization-only vendors tend to speak about an IT nirvana in which everyone and everything that is connected to this world is virtual, open and simple - devoid of the messy details of the physical world. Does this sound anything like most IT shops?

Virtualization solutions must work and deliver a unified user experience across both virtual and physical environments. Solutions that can't deal with the physical device world do not work in the real world where flexibility, constant change, and migrations are the norm.