With the increasing success of virtualization from VMware new doors have opened up from an innovation standpoint as to what else can be software defined. New stack of technologies are currently being developed and a couple of areas are especially interesting to watch.
Software defined Network and Storage is now making significant inroads and each offers a promise that is hard to ignore. I will be attending the session STO5420 from Chad Sakac in hopes to know where the future of SDS is from an EMC/VMware standpoint. Chad’s blog posts and sessions are highly informative and his unique insight has no boundaries. From personal experience, I have seem him speak at EMC World & VMWorld previously and there is so much innovation that is discussed by him that truly opens up your eyes.
So what do I expect from Chad’s session – let’s put it out here and then compare later with Chad’s presentation. My biggest expectation from Software Defined Storage is the performance layer. With traditional storage the capabilities have been maxed out and a new platform is needed altogether if something new is to be proposed. But can we leverage traditional storage with high performance SDS is very important to people like me. Companies make significant investment in hardware resources and it is not easy to fall behind when new technologies keep popping up all over the place. EMC has integrated many products successfully and my hope is that with some of their recent acquisitions the SDS space is going to provide benefits without major changes to infrastructure environments. At the end of the day, my perspective is that disk becomes a commodity just like compute is being targeted. However, quality infrastructure can never be replaced by commodity hardware and that distinction needs to be maintained for high performance environments.
Besides software integration with traditional storage for high performance I am also interested to see what new caching capabilities are going to be rolled out, how the functional aspect is going to work with VMware technologies, and how iSCSI/NAS specifically will be enhanced. Currently, I hate the fact that software initiators are very restrictive in their configuration. I would like to see more capabilities and configuration options in this space by VMware, EMC, and various other storage providers. VMware’s expertise can create a niche market here if they do it right.
The big question is how will they do it. Let’s see if Chad’s session covers it. I’ll do a follow-up post to it as well.