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Home > Archive > Data Storage > February 2006 > virtualization
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| Stuart Savill 2006-02-03, 5:48 pm |
| I am looking at virtualsiaztion in the storage space, and specifically
within the fabric - what are peoples feelings around products
available and ways of implementing this technology?
Many thanks,
Stuart.
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| Hi,
The virtualisation different level products by HP are
(1) Host level - HP Open View Storage Virtual Replicator
(2) Fabric Level - HP Openview Continous Access Storage Appliance(CASA)
(3) Storage system level - EVA array
Hope you are looking beyond this then please let me know whats the
specific.
Thanks & Regds,
Babi
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| On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 11:33:07 -0500, Stuart Savill wrote:
>I am looking at virtualsiaztion in the storage space, and specifically
>within the fabric - what are peoples feelings around products
>available and ways of implementing this technology?
Hi Stuart, (hmmm... that name seems very familiar...)
I've been looking at virtualization technologies for quite a few years
now. I've spoken with most of the big players in this area over that
time, and while I don't claim to be an expert, I do have an opinion.
What's right for your environment depends very much on what you want
to do - but I have a feeling you don't need me to tell you that.
With the question you've asked, it strongly suggests you're interested
in Enterprise Storage.
There are two products I particularly like:
The HDS Tagma USP/NSC family is a great solution and allows for the
easy reuse of old kit that hasn't quite reached the end of its useful
life. It also makes it easy to migrate away from old kit when you
eventually need to do it.
HDS still have a job to really push themselves into the market - I
haven't seen much evidence that they'll be worrying EMC or HP anytime
soon. I know they've tried to reinvigorate their market presence
several times and I really can't figure out why they haven't
succeeded.
I also like Cisco's approach using the MDS 9000 Storage Services
Module to run virtualization in the Fabric. I believe that this is a
great place to have your virtualization control - after all a properly
designed SAN should be capable of outlasting your storage devices. And
who'd bet against Cisco?
If I was building a green-field storage data centre I'd probably go
the cisco route if budget allowed.
Many of the other virtualization solutions still rely on in-band
processing, which I still have a hard time in justifying to myself.
Out-of-band solutions are still relatively thin on the ground, I
suspect because it's difficult to achieve. OOB also requires
host-based software which can be a barrier in many organizations.
In my experience lots of organizations shy away from virtualization
because the technology requires you to bet almost everything on the
vendor you choose. Some of the smaller companies in virtualization
have some really good products, but without the financial backing of a
big name they will continue to have a hard time in the market.
All of the storage big boys have had a play with virtualization but my
belief is that they are playing catch-up...
- HP screwed up big time with CASA (IMHO)
- IBM make a big song and dance about SVC, but in reality they're
quite worried about EMC and NetApp
- I am told that EMCs Invista was released too early and doesn't work
very well (someone correct me please if this is wrong)
- NetApp... well they don't do virtualization like everybody else, but
what they do, they do very well.
Hope this provided some food for thought. ;)
HVB.
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| Faeandar 2006-02-06, 8:46 pm |
| On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 11:33:07 -0500, Stuart Savill
<stuart.savill@net-user.org> wrote:
>I am looking at virtualsiaztion in the storage space, and specifically
>within the fabric - what are peoples feelings around products
>available and ways of implementing this technology?
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Stuart.
That has such a range of answers...
"Specifically within the fabric" says to me that you're looking at
switch-based virtualization, like offerings from Brocade and Cisco.
The Brocade solution seems a bit kludgy to me but I've not looked at
it in over a year. At the time it was a seperate box that took ports
on your switch and targetted traffic was runt hrough it.
The cisco solution seems pretty slick; card with product asics on it.
So far not alot available but the Veritas Storage Foundation for
Networking may have some serious benefits depending on your goals.
My feeling is that certain functions should be in the fabric and some
should not. I have yet to decide which is which though, the jury is
still out (there are some who think all functions should be in the
fabric). I tend to think volume management should be host based still
but backups should be in the fabric. Replication should also be in
the fabric. Those are the only ones I've settled on though.
~F
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| The two products I'm familiar with are IBM's SVC and EMC's Invista.
Neither of these products require that all your fabric or all your
storage arrays are virtualized, and each have their upsides and
downsides.
The SVC is an in-band virtualization appliance based on a two node
linux cluster. I'm not too excited about running an in-band solution,
primarily because I don't like the idea of introducing any additional
latency into the middle of my fabric (in this case 10s of ms)-- not to
mention that each node has only 4GB of cache and failure of one node
leaves me with exactly half the performance.
The upside to the SVC is that its relatively cheap, and doesn't require
any special connectivity devices. In fact, its been marketed as an
alternative to PPRC licenses on IBM's ESS for replication.
EMC's Invista is a (mostly) out of band appliance. It doesn't require
any host-level configuration/software, but does require either special
Cisco port blades (regular cards with extra daughter board), or a
Brocade 7420. These switches can handle the virtualization at line
speed so it doesn't introduce latency for any out of band IO. The SCSI
control frames (usually < %2 of SCSI traffic), though, have to be
rerouted in-band to the actual Invista appliance-- so the Invista still
has to be HA, but failure of one node wouldn't have performance
implications.
The real downside to the Invista, IMHO, is that its a more complex
solution. Its being offered by EMC only with an RPQ-- so that EMC can
validate the customer's environment. That is besides the fact that its
expensive, and you need to buy new/upgrade atleast some of your
switches.
HTH,
Aaron
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