Storage and Virtualization for everyone: Why is storage so important to any infrastructure, and why should it be highly available and virtualized?

Check out the recent: A primer on availability in virtualized storage environments
written by Richard Jenkins of DataCore Software.

Why is storage so important to any infrastructure, and why should it be highly available and virtualized?
...

For businesses looking toward the era of "software defined storage", it means that the solution to the most common problems faced by anyone administrating storage (performance, flexibility, availability, manageability, scalability) is already here, you just have to look.

Read the full post: http://storageoz.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-primer-on-availability-in-virtualized.html

The evolution of virtual storage: A movement...

http://cloud.media.seagate.com/2013/04/08/the-evolution-of-virtual-storage-a-movement-toward-open-architecture/

Richard Jenkins of DataCore Software recently explored IT evolution in relation to virtual storage environments, noting that virtual server provisioning has emerged as a cost effective way to create highly available systems. It also enabled companies to make more strategic hardware choices by raising utilization rates. Rather than invest in a completely new server, data center operators can now deploy a new VM to handle more workloads, and tasks are more easily shifted from one VM to another to maximize reliability. Although storage has always been an essential component of these systems, Jenkins pointed out that it took longer for companies to begin exploring virtualization in this area.