Hold The Hardware?

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Writing about virtual storage appliances today is like writing about a dart that's traveling through the air en route to a dartboard. It's moving fast; you know it's going to hit. You're just not sure whether it will get the bull's-eye.

The virtual storage market is a work in progress. As a segment of IT, virtual storage has to compete with ever-declining pricing of real iron and physical storage appliances, it has to compete with the emerging and intriguing cloud computing segment, and it has to compete with ever-more-limited IT resources for deployment and management. But it brings to the table important benefits: reduced infrastructure costs, ease of deployment and backup, and, not unimportant, a reduction in physical assets that an enterprise will need to have managed. Virtual storage applications provide many of the good elements of cloud computing -- namely no narrow racks to scrape your hands on and no pulled muscles while locking a physical appliance into place. But, in addition, the virtual storage platform provides the ability to manage arrays and volumes of data -- as well as back them up and easily recover them when needed. It's cost-effective in many regards.

There are drawbacks, though. While VMware has developed into the most robust virtualization platform on the market, virtual storage vendors appear to be doing their best to ignore Citrix or Microsoft's Hyper-V technologies for optimization of their offerings. We'll come back to this point later, but it's going to have to factor into your decision about how much time, energy and financial resources to invest in this space with all the other dynamics at play in enterprise storage and data center transformation.

Also, while virtualization can solve any number of IT problems with speed and low cost, performance and infrastructure will need to be monitored constantly. Little-used, archival data on virtual storage won't present as much of a problem in this regard. But virtualizing a server to share storage and administration resources means sharing performance; shared performance means latency could be an issue. And there are many instances when latency has to be avoided.

For this month's issue of CRNtech, we took a look at several virtual storage appliances using a standard VMware server, or the free VMware Player as a host platform. The virtual appliances we examined ran the gamut from technology provided by tier-one vendors like Hewlett-Packard, with its LeftHand appliance, to a bare-bones, do-it-yourself Ubuntu JeOSbased one. There are strengths and limitations to each but they all installed on VMware and worked with, at the most, minor aggravation.

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