I feel bad about this but everytime Hu posts on storage virtualisation; I think he does harm to HDS. Redefining Storage Virtualisation, declaring Virtualisation 2.0; these are the acts of a desperate man.
Firstly, although I've never used the HDS products in anger, I've kicked the tyres of them a few times and I believe that USP is a damn fine array. If you've them installed and they work for you, you've technically got absolutely no reason to change vendors. But then again I would probably say that of all of the 'Tier 1' vendors out there; they're all good enough. So I've got nothing against HDS as a technology vendor.
But give the virtualisation thing a rest! It's not the solution to all the storage issues in the world! If it were, we'd all be rushing to put it in (or are we just too stupid to see that it is the solution to all the storage problems in the world?).
And this insistance that USP is somehow different to SVC is rubbish! SVC and USP are extremely similar conceptually just implemented in slightly different ways! Hu and HDS boast of thousands of processors, ports etc; there's must be better because it's bigger and more shiney; IBM have taken the approach that you can build something from commodity hardware, it doesn't have to be huge to be powerful; it sort of reminds of the difference in approach to building sports-cars. If HDS were an American company, I would suggest that they were building muscle-cars whereas IBM are trying to take the more European route.
Hu is right on one thing tho', 80% of storage in future data-centres will probably be commodity-based modular arrays. Unfortunately, I don't think that these are going to be controlled by Enterprise Virtualisation controllers. Certainly not the current range of the USP anyhow; USP is incredibly limited as to what it can support out of the controller as is SVC.
We are going to see more commodity based storage appliances managing/federating/virtualising the storage access layer; these appliances will provide all kinds of interesting functionality but increasingly they will run on top of x86-based Linux hardware. It won't be about the number of processors, ports; it'll be about building efficient and reliable architectures using standard components. Some of these appliances will ship as virtual machines; bring your own hardware.
Aha…perhaps that's Virtualisation 3.0; I'm going to wait for Virtualisation 3.11 tho'!
Agree re HDS being fine and similarly all Tier1 arrays – 85% identical, and all ‘fit for purpose’.
Agree re the ‘virtualisation’ hype bit – even on the very rare point that the tech & tools work well and improve things, the commercial cost model just blows away any possible benefit 🙁
Commoditity storage thought :-
* lots of servers running a RevStor or SeaNodes style agent to present ‘virtualised storage’
* on each VMWare server simply load a VSA as an ‘extra’ guest image and allocate it some surplus DAS of the host
Intrigued as to just how much DAS could be ‘scouped-up’ and presented as a virtual storage network…
Martin
It doesn’t get mentioned by Hu that UVM as a product isn’t free. In fact, in my experience it has taken a lot of “cheap” storage to make the UVM licence worthwhile.
Hey Brother – I am going to respond to your post on my HDS blog. Good discussion.