EMC: beware the storage virtualisation quick fix

Ken Steinhardt has just taken over as the chief technology officer of EMC's customer liaison organisation, at a time when the storage industry is experiencing a period of particularly explosive growth.

Steinhardt's role is to stay ahead of the trends in storage, feeding the company's ideas out to EMC's customers and the customer's ideas back to the company's management. Sitting at this cross-roads gives Steinhardt a unique perspective on the storage market, so ZDNet UK caught up with him just a few days after he took up his new role.

One of the really hot areas of development in the storage world is virtualisation. Steinhardt has some very clear ideas on the future and in particular what he sees as a key mistake many companies are making, going for a quick solution.

The lesson is to avoid the siren call of a low cost, easier-to-implement in-band virtualisation solution, as out-of-band is trickier but the only way to go, he says.

Q: What major trends do you see developing storage?
A: There are three things that are hot: virtualisation across the entire IT infrastructure; iSCSI; and business continuity — the concept of continuous data protection as an adjunct to back-up, recovery and disaster recovery.

For a whole heap of reasons, I think the value proposition of continuous data protection is just so overwhelming that it will become ultimately as common as back-up itself.

iSCSI, as a standard, has been around for some time. Is it really coming to the forefront now, and if so, why?
When the standard was finalised, roughly about three years ago now, this finally gave all the vendors clear direction in terms of, "how can I build things so that all of our products will play together?"

There were some vendors who jumped in before the standard, stirring things up, and I think that led people to wonder what was happening and why was it taking so long to get a standard. But they wound up with products that couldn't work with the reality of the market. Some of the most vocal vendors ultimately wound up not even being competitors.

The other challenge was that to make it work, you needed all of the pieces of the chain. Some vendors who have one piece of the standard that was rock solid, and would believe that was all they needed. But if they were an HBA vendor and the network infrastructure wasn't there, or the management tools weren't there, then [they failed].... You needed it all.

It was one those scenarios where, if one of the links wasn't there, then none of them were there.

Now, in 2006, all of the pieces are there. You've got the interfaces from the network card sitting up there on the server, operating system support, physical network infrastructure down to the storage with management tools that can see this, replication software and so, for many customers, all of the pieces of the puzzle are now there.

So I see iSCSI as a complement to NAS and Fibre Channel (FC) technologies rather than something that replaces either. I think there is a bright future for all three.

If we look at information lifecycle management (ILM), I envisage people will deploy different storage architectures as they do different network architectures, differentiated by different levels of service. They will be based on performance, availability and application requirements.

I think you will see iSCSI deployed that way. With some people it will be their network attached storage, for example, but they find they need a higher level of performance and the next logical jump could be iSCSI. And you will see it come from the other direction. People who are currently using FC will see that iSCSI might meet their requirements, so they can reduce their costs. So they can scale down and scale out from what they do with FC. But I also see some organisations deploying all three. They will apply the appropriate cost for the appropriate service and cost level.

It should really be a case of starting now with NAS and saying "why not?" before they jump to a different technology.

What about users who want one architecture, not three, for the sake of simplicity?
Well, the economic arguments are so strong now. If you don't need FC, then the argument is compelling. You don't have to buy HBAs or fibre channel switches. If iSCSI meets the service level then will be less expensive and so it will be an appropriate choice.

But then what I am also seeing is bridging products. In January we announced Multi-path file system iSCSI (MPFSi) which we haven't really talked about but it gives you the best of both worlds in one product.

MPFS and iSCSI lets a user make a request in iSCSI and the request always comes through the NAS side. The delivery of the information back — depending on the size and nature of the object, big request versus small simple one — will be delivered back on the NAS side if it was small object and if it was a large one it can be delivered through iSCSI, through the same infrastructure. Why would I do it through iSCSI? Two to four times the performance, even over the same wires.

So this is ideal for applications where the request is small but the delivery very large. The user will say: "Wow, that came back fast."