I find some trends in the storage industry at present more than a little irritating; I seem to be going through a bit of an angry stage and for that I apologise. I'm sure my normal cheerful self will re-appear at some point and I can leave the grumpy bit to the inimitable Ian at GrumpyStorage.
Now, a lot of my focus at present is on some particular niche areas of storage but that doesn't stop me looking at the wider picture and it certainly doesn't stop me talking to various vendors about what they are up to. A phrase that comes up more and more is 'our storage is optimised for VMWare and virtualisation'; you see to me that is just a little bit nonsensical. If you take the more and more commonly held belief that there is no workload that cannot be virtualised; what you are saying is that your storage is optimised for every workload out there.
VMWare is a platform, not a workload in itself; for example, we could use VMWare in our corporate billing environment as the underlying platform but you can bet your bottom dollar that most storage which is claimed to be VMWare optimised will just melt! Now this is a real edge case application but I think it's important that vendors realise that edge cases are out there and when you talk about VMWare optimised storage, you really have to qualify what you mean. I would like vendors to start giving more example workloads and also being up front what will and won't work; it'll stop us wasting time on trying things which really won't work.
Let's all stop talking about VMWare (and virtualisation) as a workload in itself and lets start thinking about what the real applications are. Yes, this means you need to understand a bit more and it might involve more than sticking some brochureware on the screen but in the long term, it might be worth it.
And I might stop being so grumpy with some of you guys!!
Thanks Martin, us vendor marketing and sales people can’t help ourselves.
In 3PAR’s case, the VMware optimized statement reflects our design goal for consolidating storage and handling mixed workloads. We assume that VMware environments include many virtual servers with many different applications and therefore, are mixed workload environments.
But, as you point out, VMware environments can be comprised of all sorts of applications – including single applications. For instance, it is certainly possible to run a single virtual system and application in a VMware environment, in which case our system might not be the best choice.
I think some of the claims made by other vendors about VMware optimization have to do with the integration of management functionality with VMware’s management tools, aka: vCenter. In that case they might be optimized to work with VMware’s management tools – even if they can’t handle the diverse workloads they are faced with.
Indeed Marc, problem is that most sales people do not understand the idea of optimisation for management as opposed to optimisation to support a particular workload.
Integration with vCenter is great but just needs a better understanding as to what this means.