IBM has announced the first two products in its much-vaunted storage virtualisation push, aimed at reducing storage management complexity while supporting the tried and trusted IBM mantras of high availability, scalability and reliability.
The TotalStorage SAN (storage area network) Volume Controller and SAN Integration Server products will both be generally available on 25 July. The products aim to provide a central point of control for volume management, a common platform for advanced functions (copy services, quality of service and data protection), and a means to improve capacity use.
Aside from making all the right noises for an enterprise environment, namely highlighting the fabled robustness of its architecture, IBM also joins several other players, such as Hitachi Data Systems, in claiming interoperability with competing vendors` products. However, the first incarnations will support only IBM storage servers, with support for "the obvious names like EMC and HP" aimed for towards the end of this year.
"Customers will be able to upgrade as such support becomes available," says Jens Tiedemann, VP for marketing, IBM storage software group.
Most of the big vendors embrace open standards like common information model (CIM), extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP), enabling their devices to be managed by all other management tools, and their tools to manage all other devices.
Letting go of the apron strings
"The most important benefit of virtualisation is that it cuts the umbilical cord between server and storage systems," says Tiedemann. He says this solves the dilemma of pre-virtualisation SANs, which, despite their sophistication, still had to be taken down, he says, to "move storage around" when capacity was reached.
"Managing a virtual array improves capacity utilisation and gets rid of costly downtime," he adds.
But not everyone supports the virtualisation ideal as fervently as IBM. Roger Turner, Hitachi Data Systems` director for midrange products in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says virtualisation does not yet deliver enterprise-class solutions. While Hitachi owns shares in virtualisation companies such as DataCore (also a previous supplier to IBM), these players feature in the midrange space, Turner says, and not at the high end.
"It`s basically an alternative to policy-based management, which we prefer," he says. "It`s an interesting approach, but doesn`t address the core of the problem. As capacity increases, there is also an increase in other things like the need for data protection, the number of channels and so on.
"And while virtualisation theoretically increases sizing, in a way saying 'it is as big as it will ever need to be`, and in the process hiding the storage system and its capacity from the administrator, policy-based management actually addresses the physical size aspect."
Turner says the two approaches will eventually converge. IBM in turn differentiates its virtualisation offerings from DataCore, saying it is more scalable and has better availability.
IBM`s own policy-based management tool, Tivoli SAN Manager, is the first to support the TotalStorage Virtualisation family, the vendor says. The two products can operate in tandem, enabling the administrator to choose the appropriate management tool. In addition, Tivoli provides error detection and predictive fault and failure analysis, as well as automated actions, based on user-defined policies, and more.
Scaling Everest
The SAN Volume Controlled design scales storage capacity, Tiedemann says, by adding input/output (I/O) groups through adding more disks to the attached storage array. It has support for up to 280 000 I/Os per second, up to 1 780MBps of throughput and up to two petabytes of pooled storage.
The base configuration price of this product is $60 000, while the SAN Integration Server (a "SAN in a can" for new SAN deployments, complete with fibre channel switches), the complete solution, costs $140 000.
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