I have almost completed an installation of DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation product and wanted to find out about how the wider SQL Server (in my case) community feel about storage virtualisation.

It just so happened that one of the articles I ended up reading was written by the always excellent Brent Ozar. It discusses the topic using real life use cases and quite a lot of detail.

For the customer I have implemented DataCore, they don’t quite need to worry about some of the issues that Brent points out, but some of the points are certainly worth considering.

IBM’s SVC has been around for a good few years now and it is by all accounts quite popular. It does a great job of aggregating lots of disparate storage (IBM and Non-IBM) and presenting through a more scalable and manageable interface.

Well SVC has had a make-over with the release of 4.3 and some of the key feature announced in the press release are:

• Space Efficient Virtual Disks – Or as everybody else calls it Thin Provisioning
• Space Efficient FlashCopy – Or as everybody else calls it Thin Provisioned Snapshots
• Virtual Disk Mirroring – Or as everybody else calls it High Availability
• Improved Interoperability – Or as everybody else calls it… err Improved Interoperability (Mac OS X Server and WIndows 2008)

All good stuff that is already available in something like DataCore and is a very welcome addition to a mature product.