Storage Nation

Monolithic Storage Systems Developed for Mainframe Virtualization Having been in the storage industry for some time now, I have the benefit of historical perspective. I started out when mainframe storage was the only external storage available. Mainframes were the original virtual server, built for running multiple partitions of concurrent applications which drove tremendous I/O loads across special processors called channels.  In order to support this type of workload, storage vendors had to build monolithic storage systems, that had multiple processors on the front ports to match the I/O load of the channels, a large global cache that could serve a consistent cached data image to multiple, load balancing, storage port processors, back end processors that could write the data to backend storage, and still other processors that could move data for business continuity. EMC developed the Symmetrix; IBM developed the Shark; and Hitachi developed the Freedom 7700 built around these features to address the I/O requirements of mainframe virtual servers.

The term enterprise storage is thrown around as though it is a well understood term. Every storage vendor claims to have enterprise storage. When we turn to wikipedia for a definition of enterprise storage we find it is very general