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By Heidi Biggar - Infostor
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Recent announcements from
storage virtualization vendors reflect a growing trend toward
comprehensive storage management and a de-emphasis on
individual components, including virtualization.
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"Users just want a
solution," says David Lamont, vice president of marketing
at Vicom Systems. "They don't want to deal with the
underlying technologies-virtualization or otherwise-or with
cobbling them together."
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Lamont says that buying
virtualization software alone is like buying the engine of a
car without the rest of the car. "It really doesn't do
much for you," he says. What end users are looking for,
he explains, is not virtualization per se, but solutions to
problems like disk utilization, resource sharing, storage
management, growing storage costs, and system downtime.
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Vicom last month announced
that its virtualization will be designed into Sun StorEdge
disk arrays. The engine will make its debut in Sun's 6900
midrange system, which the company announced in February (see
"Sun refocuses on storage," p. 10).
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Do end users really know what
virtualization is? "I don't think so," says Lamont.
"But do they want to pool all their storage or be able to
scale from a couple of boxes to an enterprise system?
Yes."
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So, rather than belabor the
various definitions of virtualization (data abstraction, data
pooling, etc.) and their various implementations (i.e., host,
network, and storage), virtualization vendors say they will
instead focus on the larger picture-storage management-and the
role virtualization plays there.
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"The more things you can
centralize, the better," says Ken Horner, vice president
of marketing at DataCore Software. Looking to exchange its
virtualization vendor hat for one of storage management
provider, DataCore recently released SANsymphony 5.0, which
integrates several new software modules (see figure).
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"DataCore has already
done snapshot, replication, and asynchronous mirroring, so why
not put together an application programming interface (API)
that other applications can write to and therefore become a
storage management platform?" says Arun Taneja, a senior
analyst with Milford, MA-based Enterprise Storage Group, an
industry analyst firm.
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Taneja says the idea of
building a storage management platform out of a virtualization
framework makes sense for a simple reason: Virtualization
takes the physical devices and their idiosyncrasies out of the
equation, making it easier to integrate new applications.
SANsymphony supports all leading storage devices and operating
systems and works in Fibre Channel, IP, and hybrid
environments.
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New to SANsymphony 5.0 are
automated network volume management, storage domains, hybrid
IP/FC SAN and SCSI Transport over IP (STP/IP) support, and an
asynchronous IP mirroring (AIM) client.
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TrueSAN regroups * After
disappearing from the storage scene for nearly a year, TrueSAN
in February resurfaced as a pure-play vendor of storage
management software, having permanently shelved its hardware
business. The company, which is reportedly testing its
Cloudbreak storage management software platform with about 20
customers, including four Fortune 500 companies, is expected
to ship first units in June.
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DataCore and TrueSAN may
share the same objective, but they are going about it in very
different ways. The big difference is that TrueSAN is starting
from scratch, while DataCore is building on an existing
software and customer base.
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"This is a very large
job for one company-particularly a start-up-to do," says
Taneja about TrueSAN's game plan. "But the market is
still young enough that it's anybody's game." According
to market researcher Gartner Inc., the storage management
software market will represent a $16.7 billion opportunity in
2005.
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TrueSAN's Cloudbreak
operating system takes four storage management
technologies-storage resource management (SRM), business
continuance, storage network and device management, and
distributed virtualization-and integrates them into a unified
platform.
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"There are point
products out there, but they require users to assemble a
variety of host-based or storage-resident software," says
Tom Isakovich, TrueSAN founder, CEO, and president. "The
fact that we can integrate all these pieces together-and keep
it out of the data path-gives us a leg up."
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The four pieces are tied
together by a central API or policy manager and are managed
through a Java-based user interface (see figure).
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While Cloudbreak does not
require access to the APIs of leading storage vendors to work,
Isakovich says the company plans to partner with these vendors
and others to develop capabilities specific to a particular
vendor's hardware and to ensure compatibility with their
products.
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Explains Isakovich, "For
example, if Hitachi Data Systems gives us their API, we would
develop an Interoperability Module that plugs into their API
and enhances the management of Hitachi systems in Cloudbreak."
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Along these lines, TrueSAN
last month announced that it has gained access to Brocade's
Fabric Access API, which will enable users to monitor and
manage Brocade SilkWorm fabric switches within a Cloudbreak
environment.
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The Cloudbreak operating
system runs on top of Linux on Intel servers (sold in a pair
for redundancy) and acts as the central management point for
the SAN. A separate driver is installed to enable
virtualization and SRM features. Because the server is out of
the data path, only one server is needed per fabric,
regardless of the amount of storage traffic over the network.
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Cloudbreak is storage,
server, switch, and protocol agnostic and supports Windows
NT/2000 and most versions of Unix. The software will be priced
on a per-gigabyte basis, depending on the number of features
(two to four) used.
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InfoStor March, 2002
Author(s) : Heidi Biggar |
