'Straddling the fence' on virtualization

Computerworld - Q: You have said that network-based intelligence has been slow to happen. Can you give examples of where it has worked? -- F.F., Baltimore

A: Sure. There are a bunch of pocket successes so far out there, and a lot more will start happening soon. For example, StoreAge sells their software (think of it as a superclustered volume manager distributed across heterogeneous machines) so that it executes not only on servers but also on the Troika (now owned by Q-Logic) platform. I understand it works well.

Falconstor has all sorts of services that can execute on an "appliance" in the network, from migration to replication to continuous data protection.

Brocade has its Data Mobility software, which runs on their Rhapsody-based switch platform in the fabric that enables heterogeneous migrations. EMC's InVista [software on a switch] is also designed for migrations, at least initially.

You can say that guys like Acopia, Neopath and Rainfinity (now EMC) are network-based intelligence platforms designed to provide file-based migration capabilities (and global name-space, etc.).

IBM's SAN Volume Controller sits in the Fibre Channel fabric to provide block virtualization and some services. I could go on all day.

Perhaps the most shining success of network-based intelligence is the IP network itself. Talk about virtualization! It wasn't that long ago that you had to manually establish connections of each device on the net, but who does that anymore? Plug something in, it just works. You don't spend all day long understanding interdependencies, charting addresses in Excel and doing extensive planning before you add a node to your IP network -- but you sure do in storage. The storage world hasn't learned yet that the value is not in the interface but at a much higher level. That's why things still don't plug and play in storage.

My point in that previous article was that the pure play network guys haven't loaded intelligence directly on the switching infrastructure yet (see "EMC has the best virtualization story"). They are all working on it, but they don't have it yet. Brocade, McData, and Q-Logic are all shipping an off-switch intelligence platform, and Cisco is still committed to joining the fray. It's an interesting bit of fence-straddling they all have to do, however, since the original storage manufacturer has been responsible for selling all the storage switches, and a lot of them feel that by the switch guys loading their boxes with "smarts," it can take away from the value the storage guys bring. It's an interesting dance to say the least.