I continue to muse about the private cloud vision and how it’s altering the building of products for the information storage industry. At the same time I’ve been learning about heterogeneous storage layering by way of reading (and watching) the storage blogosphere.
One topic I learned about regarding heterogeneous storage layering was NetApp’s “decrease primary storage guarantee”, which involves putting a vSeries in front of third party storage. Chuck doesn’t get it, SteveD likes the marketing. StorageBod also weighed in.
Another topic was Tony’s multi-media series describing Hitachi virtualization, in which Hitachi storage can also front storage from third party vendors. It reminded me that The Storage Architect recently wrote a very good post describing the logistics of executing Hitachi virtualization.
Each approach, as pointed out by StorageBod and the Storage Architect, involves a significant degree of storage plumbing by IT staff. It’s no small investment to connect heterogeneous devices.
The private cloud paradigm is meant to eliminate this investment.
Building an Internal Private Cloud
If a customer chooses to implement a private cloud using a virtual DataCenter OS (VDC-OS), they are looking to move away from spending a large amount of their time deploying, connecting, provisioning and migrating their storage. Will they have the option of deploying heterogeneous storage layering? Of course. Will they want to? No.
Instead, they will likely be deploying storage technologies that integrate into their VDC-OS with a minimum of hassle and a maximum of capability. Private cloud builders will resist investing in classic virtualization infrastructures and focus their funds on this new paradigm. One of the remarks made in Forrester research (on page 6 – single storage vendor) is that heterogeneity of storage vendor gear in private clouds is not the norm.
And as I think through heterogeneous storage layering in the private cloud context, there’s another angle that makes layering less likely: the transition to external private clouds.
Controlling What Matters
When a company decides to get out of the internal data center business, they can Vmotion their private cloud right out of the building and into the domain of an external service provider. Their focus becomes the control of security and SLAs, as opposed to storage plumbing.
The storage technologies used by that external provider are a black-box. There’s no guarantee that the storage deployed externally will have any relation to what had been used internally. Pools of storage will have quality of service metrics and that’s it. It’s up to the external provider to use a storage technology of choice.
Back to the Musing
So where does that leave a storage software developer when it comes to the building of storage systems? Keep one eye of the delivery of storage hardware while continuing to progress the encapsulation of the hardware into VMware Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs).
After years of focusing on building specific storage system features (RAID, thin, snap, remote, dedup, etc), there’s a new storage system feature that will begin to trump the rest: ease-of VSA deployment and management.
I’ve got some ideas on how to build this “next great storage system feature”. I can lay some of them out going forward. It involves translating some of the traditional, thorny storage system issues (software upgrade, failover/failback, manual provisioning, migration, etc) into a VSA context.
But the ideas would be best served if driven by the customers that want to build private clouds.
Feedback welcome……
Steve
