Virtualised Automated Storage Tiering; Tony Asaro is a fan of the Compellent technology, much like myself. Well, when I say I'm a fan; I think it's great idea but I've not deployed it. There's simply not enough hours and money in the bank for me to play with all the things I'd like. But Tony suggests taking it a stage further, Automated Storage Tiering across array boundaries; I'm going to coin the term VAST for this concept.
Now currently the idea of VAST terrifies me; technically I can see it being incredibly powerful but like many powerful things it could be be massively dangerous. Why? The current crop of SRM tools struggle to tell me where my data is in non-virtualised environments; they are probably going to struggle yet further with virtualised environments and then add in virtualised environments in which chunks of the data automagically move about. I think it shows that we really as an industry need to fix the SRM thing and we have to be open with each other; what works, what doesn't work.
And it's not just the SRM tools; Interop needs to become less of an issue. If you are going to have multiple vendors kit on the floor, you don't want to get into the situation where you potentially have conflicting interop matrices.
I've not got all the answers, I've got a shed-load of questions tho'!
Knowing where your towel is…that's going to be key to enabling much of the technology that we are going to see over the next few years. And any blog entry can get a reference to the late great Douglas Adams in has got to be a good one š
This is the challenge of any infrastructure virtualization – being able to abstract above the physical but still have a strong handle and control of the physical. Since Compellent maintains metadata about each block I believe they know where everything is – knowledge of where the towel is at all times. They already have a highly virtualized storage system and probably could do what we are talking about today with relatively little effort.