Systems management is complicated... With ever-increasing reliance on IT infrastrucutre, scale and complexity grows while deploying and controlling it gets no simpler. Storage is particularly prone to this: you can never fit and forget a storage device - it will get full, need backing up and kept in a reliable condition. This problem gets more complicated with every different piece of storage attached to your system, and live data is particularly unforgiving.

Storage virtualisation is designed to fix this. It works by gathering together disparate storage devices and presenting them to a server as a single logical entity, with one point of management and greater ease of attaching and detaching extra storage.

This technology has matured to the point where it now offers a scaleable environment that enables the management of pooled resources across the enterprise, allowing IT managers to be more responsive to dynamic organisational needs and to better leverage infrastructure investments.

Storage virtualisation offers a range of significant other benefits. The top eight are:

1. Better usage of storage capacity. Pooling storage can help administrators improve upon the typical 40% to 50% capacity utilisation rates. And where you're mirroring to a secondary site, this can represent significant benefit.

2. Disaster recovery. With virtualisation, organisations can replicate asymmetrically, that is, without having to provide a matching host or disk at the disaster recovery site.

3. Quicker backups. By taking a data snapshot, virtualisation software can eliminate the bottleneck between the application server and backup server.

4. Automated management. Automation can include automatic capacity addition if a database is running out of space.

5. Application testing. Instead of testing an application against actual production data, you can use virtualisation to create a replicated data set to safely test an application against.

6. Application & database performance. Critcal files can be assigned to very high speed storage devices without affecting the function of the application.

7. High availability. By separating storage from the application, virtualisation insulates an application from a server failure.

8. Resource sharing between heterogeneous servers. A virtualisation engine can ensure that servers running different operating systems can safely coexist on the same SAN.