Storage virtualization off to a slow start

SAN DIEGO - Three years' worth of market hype hasn't been able to overcome the truth about multivendor storage virtualization: Virtually no one is doing it.

At Storage Networking World in San Diego last week, customers and industry analysts said there are a number of reasons network executives aren't rushing out to buy intelligent Fibre Channel switches or appliances that virtualize or pool the storage resources on arrays from different vendors.

"Heterogeneous - that's a good word," says Tony Prigmore, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "You have a classic situation where all the branded vendors are going after their installed base. That's happening with IBM's SAN Volume Controller; it's happening with HP, Hitachi Data Systems and EMC. Vendors are just now starting to expand to support arrays from other vendors."

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SAN DIEGO - Three years' worth of market hype hasn't been able to overcome the truth about multivendor storage virtualization: Virtually no one is doing it.

At Storage Networking World in San Diego last week, customers and industry analysts said there are a number of reasons network executives aren't rushing out to buy intelligent Fibre Channel switches or appliances that virtualize or pool the storage resources on arrays from different vendors.

"Heterogeneous - that's a good word," says Tony Prigmore, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "You have a classic situation where all the branded vendors are going after their installed base. That's happening with IBM's SAN Volume Controller; it's happening with HP, Hitachi Data Systems and EMC. Vendors are just now starting to expand to support arrays from other vendors."

So far, Hitachi, HP, IBM and Sun are shipping either array-based storage virtualization or Fibre Channel switches that pair with server appliances to add intelligent services to the storage fabric. Hitachi has an intelligent controller in its TagmaStore array that virtualizes the storage resources attached to it. IBM and EMC manufacture server-based appliances that attach to Fibre Channel, director-level switches from Brocade, Cisco and McData to virtualize storage resources.

All these companies say they support heterogeneous storage virtualization. Hitachi's TagmaStore, for instance, can connect to IBM Enterprise Storage Server and EMC's Symmetrix and Clariion products.

Dave Hill, senior analyst for the Mesabi Group, points to another stumbling block on the way to heterogeneous virtualization: Customers and vendors want to protect existing assets and investments.

"I'm not sure that vendors are as anxious as they say to implement data migration or replication services on a switch or other virtualization appliance," Hill says. "Customers want to be able to use the software - EMC's [Synchronous Remote Data Facility] - they already have. They are not going to rip and replace to implement a virtualization appliance that doesn't give them any additional capability."

Prigmore agrees. "The problem is, customers have software investments in their branded arrays, and they are not going to get rid of them to deploy a heterogeneous virtualization solution," he says.

One such user is a technology strategist and storage architect for a Fortune 500 company that he cannot name. "Why do I need [EMC's] Invista for migration when I can just migrate that data to a new array and shut down the old one?" he asks . "A lot of environments are still fairly siloed, and there is no real trust that vendors can actually cooperate, so everyone creates niche solutions that work with only their gear," he says.

A customer who does see the bright side of virtualization - albeit homogeneous - is Michael Amble, director of information services for Fidelity National Financial in Jacksonville, Fla. Amble has virtualized about 600TB of data on Hitachi TagmaStore and Thunder 9585V systems to help him implement an information life-cycle management (ILM) strategy. "The business is such that the allocation of storage space is really important to us," he says. "We have a system that has to be sized for that business. Having the ability to move disk storage between tiers is terribly important for us."