Who is the virtualization storage administrator?
Interesting post on The changing role of the IT storage pro by John Webster who interviewed the CIO of an unnamed storage vendor
The CIO observed that the consolidation of IT infrastructure driven by server virtualization projects and a future rollout of virtual desktops is forcing a convergence of narrowly focused IT administrative groups. This convergence will cause IT administrators to develop competency in systems and services delivery in the future, rather than remain silo’ed experts in servers, networks, and storage.
Virtualization has brought about the convergence of systems and networks; the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet within the data center changes the nature of the relationships between enterprise IT operational groups as well as the traditional roles of server, networking, and storage groups.
As the virtual operating systems (VMware, MS Hyper-V, etc.) progress, we will see an increased tendency to offer administrators the option of doing both storage and data management at the server rather than the storage level. Backups and data migrations can be done by a VMware administrator for example. Storage capacity can be managed from the virtualized OS management console.
John’s observations tie-in with the lessons from the two preceding posts where we explored Netapp’s virtualization storage features and thin provisioned thin virtual disks, where we learnt that the administrators have to understand not just the file system nuances but also the storage features to use storage for virtualization effectively.
