Information is increasingly becoming the primary asset that a company controls. The efficiency with which a company manages, processes and retains information is what differentiates one well-run firm from another. Executives and IT professionals understand that, as information becomes more valuable, it is critical to retain and safeguard corporate data.

With the use of server virtualization technologies and an increasing number of Cloud deployments, organizations have a need for data movement to occur on an ongoing basis. Complicating this is the requirement that data movement be transparent to applications and may occur over geographic boundaries. Workloads must be balanced between multiple elements within a data-center and between data-centers spanning a metropolitan area. Transforming IT data-centers will require coordination of each aspect of technology–including applications, servers, networking and storage.

As the boundaries between internal and external IT diminish, Cloud Computing will become a requirement for how IT is delivered and consumed. This trend is continuing as organizations shift IT resources to common hardware and software elements. Delivering IT as a Service (ITaaS) requires standard components, extreme flexibility at scale and the capability to move applications and data without boundaries.

There have been several approaches and technologies used to enable transparent data movement; however, these solutions are not equivalent, with some creating additional issues. In this paper, we analyze several techniques used to enable transparent data movement and investigate the challenges and relative usefulness of these solutions.

As a part of this research, Evaluator Group took part in a hands-on lab evaluation of several specific capabilities of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, which are presented in this paper.