Taylor's Take on Sun Storage
My storage team and I focus on three of the most important aspects in any industry: customers, competitors and market trends. There is insight to gain and share in this role, so here is our take on Sun and Storage - Taylor Allis
Server Virtualization's Impact on Storage
Today Sun announced it entered
into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek.
In a nutshell, innotek develops VirtualBox, an open source desktop
virtualization platform. On the server virtualization side, Sun has
had an alliance with VMware for 2.5 years now, and Sun has also
delivered its own Sun's xVM
platform
with some pretty unique self-healing and management capabilities. (Get OpenxVM here). innotek will add to
Sun's xVM platform, it allows laptops or desktops running Windows, Mac,
Linux or Solaris to run multiple OSes side-by-side. Cool stuff. To
learn more on innotek see the Weblogs of Steve
Wilson and Joe
Bonasera or download
VirtualBox here.
So all this server virtualization talk got us to thinking...
What is server virtualization's impact on Storage?
I admit, my team and I have discussed this and we believe that the true impact is yet to be determined - this is new stuff after all. This is what we do know:
Server Virtualization's link to storage: The most important link b/w server virtualization and storage is application mobility. In server virtualization, customers can ultimately move applications from box-to-box and system-to-system much easier than ever before. But as applications move to different systems, customers need to maintain the links to storage. If customers have to maintain links to storage as they move their applications around, it would make sense for virtualized environments to leverage networked storage - maintaining the links through the network.
Which storage network benefits the most from Server
Virtualization? SAN, iSCSI or NAS? All of the prominent storage networks, FC, iSCSI and NAS, are fighting
for virtual server market share. After reading several IDC briefs, all
three show signs of growth. In one brief, IDC claimed that Server
Virtualization contributed to the increase of industry FC SAN sales in
2007. IDC also predicts that ~50% of virtualized servers will be
attached to iSCSI in the future - citing that server admins are
generally more comfortable with IP-based storage and networks. NAS
vendors are also pushing file server networking to support virtual
servers.
Server Virtualization has the potential to dramatically impact Storage customer requirements: Server Virtualization is still emerging and maturing, but it will impact storage purchase patterns. This will (or should) impact how storage is marketed and sold and will most likely disrupt analyst's long-term forecasts of the storage market. The amount and type of impact to vendors and customers should be interesting to watch.
I'd love to hear any comments on how others think server virtualization will impact storage....
Posted at 03:36PM Feb 12, 2008 by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence | Comments[3]
Today's Page Hits: 8
Even desktop virtualization will drive more storage external. I just got my son an Apple MacBok Pro. He wanted to run Ubuntu on it, in addition to MacOS. After all, is one operating system ever enough? So what's the next thing he wanted? An external hard drive, because he needs more space. Did I mention he's 12.
Do you have any openings? Because I'm thinking he needs a job to pay for all this stuff.
On the enterprise storage side, when you've got virtual machines and virtual storage, you'd better be able to monitor it end to end. Otherwise, you just end up with blindness and finger-pointing when performance degrades or availability suffers.
Posted by John McArthur on February 13, 2008 at 12:12 PM MST #
You're right, desktop virtualization will also have an impact.
I do have an opening for a Tape analyst - but I think your 12 year old wouldn't be as excited for that. If I get headcount for a virtualization analyst, open source analyst or social networking analyst I'll ping him, we pay pretty well for that stuff nowadays.... ;-)
Posted by Taylor Allis on February 13, 2008 at 12:56 PM MST #
Hey, tape's not dead, and he's got to start somewhere. Right now, I just need him to make about $600 to pay for the video editing software he claims he needs to finish the stop-motion viral video he's making for one of my clients, Tek-Tools. I told him I'd pay him a penny a view on YouTube, but he claims he needs this extra bit of software to "do it right." His perfectionism is costing me money!
Posted by John McArthur on February 13, 2008 at 08:54 PM MST #