Storage virtualization benefits data migrations in small businesses

Storage virtualization is used in many enterprise data storage environments to help ease data backup processes such as data migration. But how is storage virtualization used and implemented in the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) environment? Do SMBs have to deal with many of the same issues as large enterprises regarding data migration? And what affordable storage virtualization products and tools are available for SMBs?

According to Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, data migration is a tedious process for everyone, including SMBs, and migrating data over a storage area network (SAN), direct-attached storage (DAS) or network-attached storage (NAS) can take as many as 40 individual steps, and most of it is manually intensive, which makes it tedious for most storage administrators. Virtualization can help ease data migration by moving the data online versus offline. It simplifies it to a point; you can do all of your data migration without disrupting your applications.

However, if a company wants to back out of virtualization, it can be a difficult process. With SAN virtualization, it's not always easy to back out of a virtualization vendor and into a non-virtualized vendor. You have to make sure that there is a way you can back out of your virtualization vendor or change vendors. But with file virtualization, it's easy to move from one vendor to another because there are still files on the end.

Staimer discusses the benefits of storage virtualization in data migrations for SMBs in the podcast below.

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Marc Staimer discusses storage virtualization for SMBs
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