Avoiding Vendor Lock-In with Storage Virtualization
An earlier blog entry focused on virtualization in general. This one focuses on storage virtualization. You can virtualize at many levels:
When people get excited about an esoteric technology, I like to ask what business problem they were hoping to solve. A typical customer desire for storage virtualization is:
By thin virtualization, I mean products that add some niche-capability, like migration or global name space, but the virtualization capabilities are limited (thin) so you still have to manage the underlying storage for things like snapshots, cloning and remote replication. Thin virtualization may add a feature you like, but it won't make storage from different vendors look the same. Pretty much all of the storage virtualization startups are doing thin virtualization.
By thick virtualization, I mean products that provide the full set of storage services: RAID, mirroring, cloning, thin provisioning, backup... everything. You really can ignore the underlying storage. The problem is that thick virtualization is pretty much a storage system. Hitachi leverages the TagmaStore architecture for thick virtualization, and NetApp builds the V-Series using ONTAP. You can make all your storage look the same, but now you have lock-in to the thick virtualization vendor instead of to the storage vendor.
Thin virtualization is useful because you get the niche-capability that it offers, whatever that is. But what is thick virtualization good for? Maybe you like one vendor for the storage itself, but another vendor has better features for one particular application. (NetApp's cloning is great for database test and development.) With thick virtualization, you can get that feature where you need it, without swapping out the underlying storage infrastructure. Or maybe you are switching to a new vendor, but you still have un-depreciated equipment from the old vendor. Thick virtualization lets you manage the old storage as if it came from the new vendor.
Even though thin and thick virtualization are both useful, my fear is that customers will become disillusioned if virtualization vendors aren't careful, because neither form solves the problem that customers wish it would, making storage easy to manage while eliminating vendor lock-in.
The root cause of vendor lock-in is lack of standards and interoperability. Standards don't tend to emerge when innovation is fast. And innovation tends to be fast whenever customers have unsolved problems that make them unhappy. In the storage industry today, I see unhappy customers driving lots of innovation that makes it hard for standards to keep up. I predict that this cycle of unhappiness and innovation will continue for a while, because the problem keeps getting harder: installed storage capacity keeps doubling, and data keeps getting more business critical.
- Disk-level—cutting disks apart, gluing them together, cloning, thin provisioning.
- Homogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multiple systems with the same architecture (Isilon OneFS, Equallogic, ONTAP GX).
- Heterogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multiple systems with different architectures.
When people get excited about an esoteric technology, I like to ask what business problem they were hoping to solve. A typical customer desire for storage virtualization is:
I don't like vendor lock-in, but I also don't like managing different storage systems. I want 'storage virtualization' to make everyone's storage look the same. Then I can buy storage from multiple vendors, but still manage it easily.I'm afraid that customers aren't going to get what they want. Today there is both thin virtualization and thick virtualization, and neither solves this problem. (Don't bother Googling these terms; I just made them up.)
By thin virtualization, I mean products that add some niche-capability, like migration or global name space, but the virtualization capabilities are limited (thin) so you still have to manage the underlying storage for things like snapshots, cloning and remote replication. Thin virtualization may add a feature you like, but it won't make storage from different vendors look the same. Pretty much all of the storage virtualization startups are doing thin virtualization.
By thick virtualization, I mean products that provide the full set of storage services: RAID, mirroring, cloning, thin provisioning, backup... everything. You really can ignore the underlying storage. The problem is that thick virtualization is pretty much a storage system. Hitachi leverages the TagmaStore architecture for thick virtualization, and NetApp builds the V-Series using ONTAP. You can make all your storage look the same, but now you have lock-in to the thick virtualization vendor instead of to the storage vendor.
Thin virtualization is useful because you get the niche-capability that it offers, whatever that is. But what is thick virtualization good for? Maybe you like one vendor for the storage itself, but another vendor has better features for one particular application. (NetApp's cloning is great for database test and development.) With thick virtualization, you can get that feature where you need it, without swapping out the underlying storage infrastructure. Or maybe you are switching to a new vendor, but you still have un-depreciated equipment from the old vendor. Thick virtualization lets you manage the old storage as if it came from the new vendor.
Even though thin and thick virtualization are both useful, my fear is that customers will become disillusioned if virtualization vendors aren't careful, because neither form solves the problem that customers wish it would, making storage easy to manage while eliminating vendor lock-in.
The root cause of vendor lock-in is lack of standards and interoperability. Standards don't tend to emerge when innovation is fast. And innovation tends to be fast whenever customers have unsolved problems that make them unhappy. In the storage industry today, I see unhappy customers driving lots of innovation that makes it hard for standards to keep up. I predict that this cycle of unhappiness and innovation will continue for a while, because the problem keeps getting harder: installed storage capacity keeps doubling, and data keeps getting more business critical.
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