This article looks at the current implementation of storage virtualization. Here is the introduction.
IT managers have grown tired of being told they "just don't get" storage virtualization. However, many vendors and analysts agree that IT managers don't understand storage virtualization and this lack of understanding is why product sales in this market have failed to live up to projections.
Despite Gartner's 2001 prediction that virtualization software sales would reach $1.2 billion by 2005, vendors have realized only a fraction of that figure so far. "There have been only about 11,000 deployments of storage-virtualization technology up to now, and they tend to be at the departmental level [and] applied to only 1 to 10 TB of storage," says Randy Kerns, senior partner with The Evaluator Group in Denver. The real money is to be made from the enterprise data-center market, where companies struggle to manage hundreds, rather than tens, of terabytes. "But that market," Kerns says, "has yet to embrace storage-virtualization technology in a big way."
The article tries to answer why. Here are excerpts from the conclusion.
Storage virtualization hasn't taken off as expected. A lack of standards, vendor infighting, and the absence of a true market leader have prevented vendors from delivering as promised.
Storage-virtualization vendors have touted technology in three broad categories: in-band [or symmetrical method], out-of-band [or asymmetrical strategy] and host-based. These serve as an alternative to the traditional RAID solutions that have come closest to virtualizing storage. In-band virtualization, championed by DataCore Software Corp., FalconStor Software and StorageTek, requires an appliance between the application server and the SAN switch. It has the potential to create bottlenecks, and its scalability is unproven. The out-of-band approach, as used by Compaq Computer Corp. and StoreAge Networking Technologies, in which the virtualization engine sits outside the data path, doesn't suffer from choke points. But the proprietary nature of these solutions has prevented this approach from becoming the dominant technology. Host-based virtualization companies, led by Veritas Software, employ virtualization software on each server host, a costly, hassle-filled strategy.
So, are you sure you want to start an enterprise project now?
Source: Jon William Toigo, Network Computing, May 27, 2002
6:31:56 PM Permalink
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