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Storage Pipeline: State of the Art: Storage on Demand: Page 3 of 4

The challenge in such a situation is virtualizing sufficient storage for the
increased demand that's inevitable when customers "start blasting apart and
recombining genes," Marshall says. "You have to trust the parameters you build
so that you know if X consumption happens, or it happens in a particular way,
you know where it is saved, how it is saved, how it is decomposed and how it is
brought back together."

Meanwhile, storage vendors are trying to simplify the storage-on-demand
process. Most of the major storage hardware vendors, including Hewlett-Packard
Co. and IBM, have released--or at least announced--storage arrays shipping with
capacity beyond immediate customer needs. In some cases the additional capacity
can be activated immediately when the demand arises.

Still, the greatest strides to virtualize that capacity for simultaneous
users are being made on the software side. Much of the virtualization technology
offered by the major players comes from acquisitions of smaller companies. In
September 2002, Sun Microsystems acquired Pirus Networks, which developed
software to virtualize storage across heterogeneous systems, and in 2001 HP
acquired StorageApps, on whose technology it now builds virtualization
appliances. Veritas offers storage virtualization across heterogeneous hardware
platforms thanks to its acquisition of several smaller companies that provide
server virtualization and application-performance management.

On-demand storage is part of an overall utility computing offering from
Computer Associates International, according to David Hochhauser, vice president
of CA's Unicenter brand. "Most companies wanting to get started in utility
computing do not want to roll in new equipment," Hochhauser says. "They want to
see how to use their existing technology."

Of course, most hardware vendors dismiss any notion that a software-only
approach is best. HP, which has offered server capacity on demand and pay for
use since 1999, has extended that approach to storage and networking, according
to Nick van der Zweep, director of utility computing for the company's
Enterprise Systems Group. With virtualization, resources can be moved where
needed without rewiring, and that requires software tools and hardware features,
including partitioning.