As those of you who follow my inane twitterings may have noticed, I've been playing with Virtual Storage Appliances.
It started with the OnTap simulator from NetApp as I wanted a play with OnTap; try a few things out and generally familiarise myself with it before we installed any. Also gave me the chance to steal a march on the techies who work for me. It's a fully featured simulator with the exception of FC connectivity for obvious reasons; it's an excellent playground and if you want a chance to learn NetApp, debug scripts, mess about with clustering etc; it comes highly recommended but….it is just a simulator and does not support anything like enough disk to make it useful. It could be useful but it needs to provide capacity. However I am not sure that NetApp are really interested!
My appetite whetted, I moved onto having a play with the Celerra simulator. Firstly EMC need to be given massive credit in that anyone can get hold of it; you don't need to be an EMC customer! EMC giving something away, I hope the dark lord has wooly mittens! Secondly, you can actually put useable capacity behind it! Well certainly enough capacity for it to act as a home NAS box, it was fun having an Enterprise-class NAS as my home NAS. And hey, I can put non-EMC disk behind a virtual Celerra 😉 Much kudos to the EMC guys!
Just recently, I've decided to give a few more a play; I've just built a Fishworks environment. Easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, a tad resource heavy but a really nice GUI. I think I could grow to really like this environment. I think I could get a decent amount of disk for me to use for my home environment, I need to reconfigure the virtual environment but definitely useable. Hey, Sun are a good software company, I wish they'd stop messing about with hardware! Actually Fishworks could give both EMC and NetApp a run for their money if it was shipped as a fully supported VSA. It could be very disruptive at the low-end to start with.
There are lots more to try; OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Lefthand and Falconstor; some on evaluation licenses, some fully useable!
I think that we are about to move into some really interesting times; installing VSAs onto whitebox hardware and building our own storage arrays. Using hypervisor technologies to provide clustering and resilience. The world of NAS is going to change I think; more and more storage will be provisioned from VSAs; test and development environments to start with but moving into low-end production.
Products like Atmos are going to ship in appliance form at some point; Atmos is a software product masquerading as a hardware solution. I can see EMC shipping a supported VSA for Atmos, Celerra and Avamar; there has been a rumoured Centera appliance for years now. If Sun have any sense, they'll ship a supported version of Fishworks aimed at virtualised environments. And NetApp…we'll see!
I predict that NAS will become a software product; there may be some pretty stringent hardware qualification requirements if you want support but it's going to come. Whilst we are it, might as well throw iSCSI into the mix; easily done in software!
And FCoE, now life becomes interesting at that point, think about it.
Oh yes, another company needs some credit for making this all possible; our friends at VMware, you can get all the mentioned environments up and running on freely downloadable versions of VMware products; ESXi is my current favourite.
I guess NAS is SW today, the celera or Dart sits on top of Redhat, Lefthand is debian i think etc etc.
I do like the way customers are able to keep up with the times and other manufacture offerings without having to go through the rigmourole of getting engageged with a VAR/Vendor just for them to come in and clunk a monolith array in a test lab.
How long before we start seeing NAS heads actually running on the MB of ESX host ESXi Style or even as a VM appliance? or is that just too
scarey?
Lefthand/HP do it today with VSA thinking about that one…but it was a startup looking to cash in off of the virtualisation game, would be interesting to see what EMC and Netapp would do.
The SUN Fishworks is a great VSA, I was amazed at how easy setup was, i think my gran could do it 🙂
Actually Dart doesn’t sit on top of RedHat; the truth is scarier than that.
As for ESXi-based NAS heads; I’m fully expecting to see this at some point. For example, there are VSAs for Celerra and Avamar in existence. You could run them both on the same blade. Basically, if the vendors don’t start doing it, the end-users might just start doing it themselves.
Actually LeftHand isn’t NAS but an iSCSI SAN solution. There are other software iSCSI solutions – check out Star Wind as well. You mentioned Falconstor. There is also DataCore – all SAN and not NAS. It isn’t an issue of NAS or SAN but whether the storage controller software is available to run in a virtual machine.
The key with any storage system in interoperability and optimization – therefore letting people rn storage system software on any server has many challenges.
I like the VSA approach but right now there is a performance penality because the storage controller doesn’t have direct access or knowledge of the underlying hardware – but this is changing with the support of VDT. I agree that this is the way to go over time – but it will be difficult for folks that don’t have a Linux or Windows kernal as their underlying storage controller OS.
It’s just as interesting to look at this question from the perspective of how people are actually going to be using NAS this year. There will still be the two basic ways it’s used: general purpose file serving (including databases and apps) and high-performance, high-availability requirements.
For the general purpose stuff, you could see a VSA approach getting some traction but actually, the more interesting question is whether the global namespace\distributed file system products out there will make more progress. The real problem with file serving is, was and will be management and not really a question of precisely what platform you’re running…
For the high-performance stuff, we’ve got the big question of pNFS and BlueArc’s hardware solutions versus the SAN file systems which should be interesting.
In the media space you have the likes of Omneon. I wonder if we’ll see them take their storage approach out of the media industry and into the wider world (scientific computing for example might find their approaches useful).
So the VSAs I’ve looked at so far are generally NAS-based; however I think that you will see VSAs which are not just NAS-based. For example, GNS products distributed as a VSA.
Products like Omneon might start to drift out of their current niche. Perhaps we’ll see a DIY RAIN approach; you provide the hardware and hypervisor layer, we’ll provide the software.
Your right, I virtualized a DIY NAS storage system down to one ESXi box very recently for a DR solution using OpenSolaris.
http://blog.laspina.ca/roller/Ubiquitous/entry/provisioning_disaster_recovery_with_zfs