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The introduction of the new carbon tax on 1 July, 2012 may mean increased energy costs for the IT industry, but at least one storage virtualization vendor has been gearing up for a predicted increase in sales.

Storage virtualization is becoming more common as companies realize the benefits of consolidating storage-area networks and streamlining their management. As with applications and servers, storage virtualization enables IT departments to decouple data from dedicated devices. An appliance serves as a go-between from applications and operating systems to the mass storage, enabling you to manage them all using one console. Thirty-eight percent of IT professionals surveyed recently by CIO said they are piloting or have deployed virtual storage technology, and another 31 percent are interested in it.

Start-up Infineta Systems is coming out of stealth mode just in time to reveal that it is working on one of the knotty problems raised this week at the EMC World conference – how to connect data centers efficiently for backup, replication and cloud services that rely on live migration of virtual machines.

A storage start-up called Virsto Software has developed a Microsoft Hyper-V add-on that speeds up access to data in virtualized data centers.

In just a few short years, storage virtualisation, also known as block virtualization, has proven its worth in the large enterprise and traveled that well-worn path from pricey boutique solution to affordable commodity. As a standard feature in all but the most modest mid-tier storage arrays, storage virtualization soothes a wide range of storage management woes for small and mid-size organizations. At the same time, dedicated solutions from top-tier vendors deliver the greatest ROI to large shops managing large SANs with intense data availability requirements.