Storage Nation

Last night, IDC released their storage market share analysis for what happened in Q2.  Some things remained the same, other parts seem to be changing. And if you watch this market as closely as I do, it's worth reviewing some of the more interesting bits. What You Need To Know For many years, IDC has published the most authoritative numbers on storage hardware and software sales.  While no methodology is perfect, I've come to view IDC's numbers as absolutely essential to anyone in the storage business. EMC doesn't give IDC access to any privileged information, they have to figure things out from published reports.  Generally speaking, IDC's estimates of EMC's business are usually within a few points (plus or minus) of our own.

As I sit back and contemplate the last few weeks, I keep coming to the same conclusion.  The market has clearly expressed its strong interest in all things cloud-like, and just about every technology vendor on the planet — large and small — is frantically repositioning themselves just as quickly as possible. Whatever "tipping point" we all were waiting for, it's clearly happened.  Game on. And I think this rapid shift has caught many in the IT industry by surprise: technology vendors, system integrators, consultants — few people are really interested in IT as usual.  Everyone wants to talk about the cloud.

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

Every so often, a well-understood category in IT becomes completely up-for-grabs in terms of answering the question: what's next?  Clearly, how we think about enterprise desktops and delivering end-user computing is now very much in play. The many announcements coming from VMworld only underscores this point

I know, there's a LOT to read and digest coming out of VMworld these days. As an occasionally proliferate blogger myself, I have to hand it to Chad — he's turned loose a veritable supernova of meaty and significant technology-oriented posts in the last few days.  I'm impressed, and I don't impress easily.  I know how much work is behind each and every one of these posts. If you have a moment, please check these out: vCloud Director and UIM VPLEX, Long Distance VM Teleportation, and a great offer ..

Phew – I hate tap-dancing around things, and I’ve been saying “project Redwood” for too long.  I’m glad the name got changed to vCloud Director – “vCloud Service Director” was a mouthful (note that the builds right before VMworld still have the old name).

Customer interest in active/active datacenters is through the roof – it’s a compelling idea. We’ve got a little pile of VPLEX/vTeleportation sessions at VMworld – I’m doing PC8051 with Beth Phalen, who is the VP who owns the product (which covers practical questions, how it works, but also shows where we are going).   Scott Lowe is doing session TA8101 (which is very focused on do’s, don’ts and best practices in these active/active datacenter use cases. The VMware KB article that covers how EMC VPLEX supports VM HA stretched cluster also went up, you can read it here . I remain convinced that we (VMware and the storage community) have more work to do (specifically around VM HA details discussed in our sessions, as well as partition handling at the VMware and storage layers) before I would personally do this myself.  But we decided that people were going to do stretched clusters, so it was more useful to be explicit about how to do it, pitfalls to be aware of.   The solution spot that is a rock right now is VMotion between clusters.

So here , we showed how vSphere 4.1 SIOC and EMC FAST can work together to make DRS for storage possible today.

DRS is not only a critical feature in vSphere, but also a critical IDEA for virtualization and cloud models (private or public).   The idea is basic: Virtualization encapsulates compute, and vMotion liberates those encapsulated objects, but VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is the thing that actually turns the cluster of servers in a dynamic pool of resources. Not only is this important for efficiency, but prioritization and QoS are critical as everyone starts to virtualize things that come with SLA requirements

With VMworld in San Francisco this week, it's only fitting that Michael Haag is on the Hotspot discussing 3PAR's support for server virtualization . If you are at VMworld this year, please stop by our booth, #313, to see what all the commotion is about and why 3PAR storage is so popular for cloud computing .