Storage becomes much like virtual machines
Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products group gave his definition of virtual storage, global federation and cache coherence to the analyst community last week.
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He talked about the private cloud and its requirement for dynamic pools of resources, operations and consumption and of IT’s need to exert control over the cloud and the workloads operating on it. As private clouds, cloud computing and virtual data centers expand, there exists a need to federate them into an orchestrated cloud or pooled cluster.
When you talk of federation, it breaks down into management of resources and control. So EMC introduced the concept of virtual storage – the abstraction of information from its physical media and the location of that media. With virtual storage, you could move thousands of virtual machines over thousands of miles, perform batch processes in low, energy consuming environments, aggregate large data centers into single data centers from smaller ones and be able to run application without restart. Virtual storage becomes much the same as virtual servers.
Once though you introduce virtual storage into an organization along with virtual servers, federation of management and control becomes more important. You need to be able to federate over wide distances and deal with bandwidth, latency and consistency where all data is updated to all locations. Federation must overcome distances and force IT to look at disaster recovery and high availability in a different way.
So you introduce the concept of distributed cache coherency in which algorithms are used to create a global view of storage and cache data that works over distance.
By creating virtualized clouds that are managed centrally, IT can handle unlimited capacity and operate applications across the global environment. They can avoid disruptive migrations by shifting workloads elsewhere in the cloud and by using virtual storage, make everything always available and improve recovery.
It will be interesting to see what EMC does with this vision in the months to come. EMC World is coming up and EMC tells us we’ll hear more about virtual storage then.
