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Replication Concerns Carry Into Virtualization: Page 3 of 4

"You can replicate in hardware- or software-based arrays; you can do it in the network as a fabric service; you can do it in the server or in the guest of the virtual environment," says Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group.

Ultimately, every shop will have to choose based on their own criteria, Schulz notes. Some may find it costs more to add storage virtualization software like DataCore's to their networks than to buy another array. Others may view the investment in remote-site arrays as justified by performance.

While there may be little distinction between the issues of virtualized versus physical replication, it's clear that virtualization is forcing some customers to look more closely at how they're working storage.

One manager, Jeremy Moss, group IT director for Anite, an IT services and integration firm in the U.K., is perhaps typical. Moss and his group moved to VMware Infrastructure three months ago, realizing they needed the data resiliency and failover options that environment offered. But implementing VMware required shared storage, and up to then, Anite had relied on DAS.

Moss says his group picked LeftHand Networks's software because it was cheaper than a NAS and wasn't tied to a particular hardware solution. "We are keen on hardware independence," he noted. His team evaluated a NetApp system, but he says it cost "twice as much" as the LeftHand software, which had the added benefit of running on Intel servers. "Once we made the choice, we also liked that we could do intersite replication using the same [LeftHand] software."