A redesign methodology for storage management virtualization

The growth of business has escalated the need to employ information technologies services rapidly to support the mounting corporate activities. Each time a new service was needed; a new server along with the relevant software and storage elements was deployed. This situation has led to what is often referred to as the “server sprawl problem,” where many underutilized servers with heterogeneous storage elements are inaugurated whereas the total operational cost is high. In this paper we propose a redesign methodology to address this problem by using virtualization-based server consolidation and modeling servers' storage unification through storage area network (SAN). Our redesign methodology attempts to maximize the average servers' utilizations and ultimately to reduce the operational cost and to guarantee an acceptable level of performance. Extensive simulations to study the servers' utilizations and the performance have been carried out to validate the redesign tactic. The experimental results have revealed the efficiency of the proposed redesign method.