Notes From Underground

Remember virtualization? After all the bubble-era hype, followed by so much deafening silence, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that this particular storage networking technology had failed to establish itself.

But we can happily report that virtualization is alive and well and living on in SANs throughout the world, albeit under some assumed names. In effect, it's gone underground, to emerge cleverly disguised.

Today virtualization is the technology underpinning a raft of network-based storage applications, or services, as they are now more fashionably dubbed. There is data replication, mirroring (local and remote), snapshotting, migration, and more all of which rely on the management of virtual volumes to operate in large SAN environments.

There are multiple approaches, all of which put virtualization squarely in the network. As detailed in the report I have just completed for Byte and Switch Insider on the subject, the intelligent switch has emerged as the most logical place from which to present data to multiple servers and carry out management functions across multiple storage devices. So switch vendors such as Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), and are developing next-generation switches to handle the basic control-path functions that a virtualization engine requires.

There also are newer companies, such as Incipient Inc., which markets its Distributed Virtualization Engine to perform all the applications mentioned above and offers a single-console management platform to run the whole infrastructure.In another vein, Candera Inc., Maranti Networks Inc., and Troika Networks are all bringing to market what some analysts consider to be a new class of device: the network storage service (NSS) platform. The NSS is half-switch, half-server (shades of trailers for 50s-era, B-grade horror movies). In fact, this is an interesting best-of-both-worlds proposition, offering greater processing power than a regular switch yet with a switching architecture to avoid the bottlenecks that traditional servers tend to produce in such situations.

Elsewhere, such vendors as StoneFly Networks Inc. are shipping virtualization technology for attachment to iSCSI storage devices. And Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the Linux distributor with the most serious ambitions to enter the enterprise market, is readying technology for logical (i.e. virtual) volume management among clustered Lintel blades, which can sit on an intelligent switch.

Bottom line? Networked virtualization has arrived, and its favorite hangout is the SAN. But at the same time, even the first generation of companies that launched virtualization products, such as DataCore Software Corp., FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC), and StoreAge Networking Technologies Ltd., now spend far more time touting their software's replication, mirroring, and migration capabilities than they do talking about virtualization per se.

Indeed, in some ways, virtualization is the technology that dare not speak its name. After all, using the term might tempt some to question why it took companies over four years to make good on those 1999 PowerPoints. There's still a whiff of doubt left over from the time when it set pulses racing, in those heady days around the turn of the millennium – and then failed to materialize in its given timeframe.

The good news is that virtualization seems to have come out fine after all. Now if we could only say the same about information lifecycle management, eh? But that's another story...— Rik Turner is a freelance writer and editor based in London. He can be reached at: [email protected]