Storage area networks (SANs) are not a thing of the past, but will soon take on new enhancements to keep up with the faster moving, agile virtual machine world of today. With these new enhancements, virtual machines (VMs) and applications become first class citizens and through policies they can be dynamically configured.
That was the main theme from the VMware User Group conference held last week in Johannesburg.
Speaking at the event, Duncan Epping, chief technologist at the VMware CTO office, said: "Organisations reliant on SANs don't want anyone to replace their arrays with the new breed of hyper-converged or Web-scale infrastructure products.
"They are very comfortable with logical unit number (LUN) snapshot management, balancing virtual machines across different physical volumes to get around LUN limitations and maintaining the many other storage administration tasks."
However, according to Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior manager of systems engineering at VMware Southern Africa, SANs were originally built for physical "scale-up" data centres but at the same time were "forced" to support virtual infrastructures while maintaining stability and speed. Building SANs with virtualisation in mind fundamentally changes the way we look at storage, he points out.
"One of the main storage challenges for SANs are the configuration complexity coupled with the processes and time. They also lack granular controls, and from an economics point of view, over-provisioning and low utilisation are typical problems that increase the total cost of ownership," says Jansen van Rensburg.
In the current world, he notes, everything revolves around pre-configured LUNs that provide VMs with storage "space and speed" allowing applications to run successfully.
"In the new world, virtual machines and applications would be dynamically configured through policies to best run on the SAN infrastructure. In other words, marrying the SAN environment with the virtual environment."
Jansen van Rensburg believes the inclusion of virtual SAN (vSAN) and virtual volumes technologies within the software-defined data centre will solve a great deal of the storage challenges organisations face.
"The software-defined data centre is about managing and provisioning resources in an agile way, which will allow IT to meet the demands of business. For storage and the workloads sitting on top more explicitly, it means resources can be abstracted and pooled and then through policy provisioning and management can be automated," he explains.
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