Stephen O’Neill, currently vice president of technology at Los Angeles-based online marketing firm Oversee.net, is a big fan of file virtualization. The technology uncouples a file’s apparent location (as users see it) from its actual location on your network, enabling technicians to perform routine server maintenance and data migration without users knowing the difference. That, in turn, has helped O’Neill avoid downtime on Oversee.net’s storage server infrastructure, which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily revenue.

Still, while O’Neill is hardly file virtualization’s only admirer, wider adoption has been slow. Indeed, in an exclusive survey conducted for Accelerate by IDG Research Services Group, only 13 percent of 340 respondents said they have current investments in file virtualization, and less than 25 percent considered it a critical or high priority for the next 24 months. Yet companies that have taken the plunge report great results: Just over 60 percent of respondents already using file virtualization said their investments have met or exceeded expectations.

Robert Stevenson, managing director of storage research at analyst firm TheInfoPro Inc. of New York, says file virtualization is best suited to companies that have over 300 terabytes of network-attached storage (NAS), or between 40 and 100 NAS devices. Though he has seen planned adoption rates lose steam in recent years, Stevenson expects a new generation of products to reaccelerate adoption as the economy reaccelerates.

“IT teams need file virtualization to be a comprehensive solution that deals with centralized file management, thin provisioning, data migration, and intelligent data classification and categorization,” Stevenson says. Most products available today, however, lack such all-inclusive functionality. Stevenson also warns of file virtualization’s complexity. “You have to have the staffing to architect it properly,” he says. “Otherwise your deployment can be problematic.”

O’Neill agrees, and urges companies to include their storage teams when rolling out file virtualization. “File virtualization is an easy concept to grasp at the top layer, but if you allow a storage engineer to dig into it, you’ll realize even more benefits,” he says.

Sandra Gittlen is a freelance technology editor in the greater Boston area. She can be reached via email at sgittlen@charter.net.

Related Content
Virtualization: It's not just for servers anymore
Mastering basic virtualization challenges, part one: Budgeting