Users Wait for Switch Virtualization

NEW YORK -- Enterprise storage administrators here at the Storage Decisions conference say virtualization belongs in the switch rather than on an appliance or in the controller. But they acknowledge that the products aren't cooked yet.

In a panel discussion, Alan Grantham, storage architect of Natonwide Insurance, and Peter Carucci, senior storage administrator at New York Stock Exchange, say they want storage virtualization -- in an intelligent switch approach. But since current products are inadequate and intelligent switches aren't quite ready, they believe implementation is months away.

Both have evaluated the Invista product from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which deploys an intelligent switch approach; the IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) SAN Volume Controller (SVC) appliance; and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) TagmaStore, which puts virtualization in the controller. (See EMC Unveils Invista, Hitachi Struts Mr. Universal, and EMC & IBM in Virtual Skirmish.)

I think the intelligent switch technology in the enterprise environment is the way to go,” says Carucci, who manages 250 TBytes of networked storage.

Invista works with intelligent switches from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD). McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) expects to have its intelligent switch ready early next year.“The scalability of an intelligent switch is many times greater than SVC,” says Carucci. In his experience, SVC tops out at 560,000 IOPS (I/Os per second). Intelligent switches, theoretically at least, can be scaled to support up to 2.5 million IOPS. Carucci also says his shop uses mostly EMC gear. To handle failures, SVC calls for a proprietary driver on every host connected to SVC. The driver does not work with other multi-pathing software, such as EMC PowerPath load balancing and failover software, he says. Invista could eliminate this problem for him.

As for TagmaStore, Carucci isn't wild about array-based virtualization.

“There’s a greater potential for problems managing virtualization within the array itself,” he says, pointing out that Hitachi uses caching for virtualization, passing I/O through the controller. “The array controller acts as a switch, and it’s not designed as a switch.”

Grantham, whose organization manages more than a petabyte of storage for a group of insurance companies, has yet to find the right enterprise virtualization product. He likes the FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) IPStor appliance for virtualizing data within one site but not for the entire enterprise, and Invista needs more testing before he can trust it.

“We haven’t implemented virtualization yet,” he says. “Invista is the only product we’ve seen that we may implement. It has to be in the switch for us -– we have to have the heterogeneous model. I like to think we’ll use virtualization eventually. If you have enterprise needs, I would consider waiting six months, let someone else break their environments testing products and wait for the switch products [to mature].”Grantham and Carucci are among the few who have Invista today, even though EMC claimed it would ship by the end of the quarter. So far, Invista hasn't even made it to the company’s September price list. EMC says Invista is primarily for the largest enterprises, which would put Nationwide and NYSE in its sights.

As much as they like the intelligent switch approach, Grantham and Carucci says Invista needs a lot more evaluation before they recommend it.

“It’s a release one product, bear that in mind,” Grantham says. “We don’t adopt anything until it’s been on the market six to eight months. If you go with intelligent switch virtualization, make sure you have a test director and lab. If it fails, the vendor will sit there big, fat, and happy, and you’re going to get called in for that discussion in the morning.”

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch