A quick search on the web will give you endless results on the battle between virtual storage and physical storage. Most seem to believe that the choice to choose one over the other is based on budget, if you have a large budget you go with physical and if you have more limited budget you would go with virtual.

Let’s take budget out of the equation for a moment a look at the fundamental differences between the 2 and why Virtual should be equally if not more considered over physical.

Sure physical storage for the most part proves to be a stronger performer delivering higher I/O’s over the virtual appliances, I say most part. Creditplus bank in Germany replaced their Physical SAN solution (which cost 10’s of thousands of Dollars) for a Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA). SvSAN from StorMagic was an interim storage solution while they were upgrading the expensive hardware, during this time they noticed that SvSAN was delivering at least 25% higher performance on I/O’s: http://www.stormagic.com/pdf/Credit_Plus.pdf

So we know that an SVA can perform to an equal standard to physical storage (obviously under the right conditions, but that’s the same for physical), so what about general use. Well, an SVA needs less tender loving care than the traditional physical storage, making it a great “Set and forget Solution” leaving IT staff spending less time fooling around with the storage and more time doing stuff that matters.

As an SVA is not a physical piece of hardware which gets out dated as technology advances, which in this day and age doesn’t take long, it’s able to keep updated as the development, no expensive maintenance costs, no need to upgrade (unless capacity requirements change).

If we bring budget back into the conversation, an SVA is substantially more affordable in comparison to physical storage.  For less than $2,000 you are able to achieve HA with 2 servers.

It’s these factors that make SVA’s like SvSAN such a popular solution for Remote Office and Branch office multi-site environments, a simple set and forget solution which delivers high availability for business continuity without breaking the bank or sucking up your IT resources.

Have a look at SvSAN