Cloud email: living the virtualized life in the flash lane

by Rob Callaghan of LSI

Where did my email go?

This week I was dragged into to the virtualized cloud kicking and screaming … well, sort of. LSI has moved me, and all my co-workers, from my nice, safe local Exchange server to one in the amorphous, mysterious cloud. Scary. My IT department says the new cloud email is a great thing. They are now promising me unlimited email storage. Long gone will be the days of harrowing emails telling me I am approaching my storage limit and soon will be unable to send new email.

With cloud email, I can keep everything forever! I am not quite sure that saving mountains of email will be a good thing 🙂 . Other than having to redirect my tablet and smartphone to this new service, update my webmail bookmark and empty my email inbox, there was not much I had to do. So far, so good. I have not experienced any challenges or performance issues. A key reason is flash storage.

To be sure, virtualization is a great tool for improving physical server utilization and flexibility as well as reducing power, cooling and datacenter footprint costs. That’s why the use of virtualization for email, databases and desktops is growing dramatically. But virtualized servers are only as effective as the storage performance that supports them. If, as a datacenter manager, your clients cannot access their application data quickly or boot their virtual desktop in a reasonable time, your company’s productivity and client satisfaction can drop dramatically.

Today, applications most likely run on virtualized servers. The upside of server virtualization is that a company can improve server utilization and run more applications on fewer physical servers. This can reduce power consumption, make more efficient use of datacenter floor space and make it easier to configure servers and deploy applications. The cloud also helps streamline application development, allowing companies to more efficiently and cost effectively test software applications across a broad set of configurations and operating systems.

A heated dispute – storage contention

Once application testing is complete, a virtual server’s configuration and image can be put on a virtual shelf until they are needed again, freeing up memory, processing, storage and other resources on the physical server for new virtual servers with just a few keystrokes. But with virtualization and the cloud there can be downsides, like slow performance – especially storage performance.

When a number of virtual servers are all using the same physical storage, there can be infighting for storage capacity, generally known as storage contention. These internecine battles can slow application response to a frustrating glacial pace and lead to issues like VDI Boot and Login Storm that can extend the time it takes for users to login to tens of minutes.

Flash helps alleviate slowdowns in storage performance

Here is where flash comes to the rescue. New flash storage solutions are being deployed to help improve virtualized storage performance and alleviate productivity-sapping slowdowns caused by VDI Boot and Login Storm — the crush of end users booting up or logging in within a small window that overwhelms the server with data requests and degrades response times. Flash can be used as primary storage inside servers running virtual machines to dramatically speed storage response time. Flash can also be deployed as an intelligent cache for DAS- or SAN-connected storage and even as an external shared storage pool.

It’s clear that virtualization will require higher storage performance and better, more cost-effective ways to deploy flash storage. But how much flash you need depends on your particular virtualization challenge, configuration and of course budget: while flash storage is extremely fast, it is costlier than disk-based storage. So choosing the right storage acceleration solution – one is LSI® Nytro™ Application Acceleration – can be as important as choosing the right cloud provider for your company’s email.

While my email is now stored in the cloud in Timbuktu, I know the flash storage solutions in that datacenter help keep my mail quickly accessible 24/7 whether I access it from my computer, tablet or smartphone, giving my productivity a boost. I can be assured that every action item I am sent will quickly make it to my inbox and be added to my ever-growing to-do list. Now my next big challenge is to improve my own response performance to those email requests!