I participated in an interesting session on CrowdChat today on the topic of server and storage convergence. The session was hosted by @wikibon and @deepstoragenet. Convergence is a very expansive subject, (I coined the term Converged Infrastructure at HP back in 2008), and I will discuss it more in future blog posts.
When things like servers and SANs DIVERGE they create choice. Which vendor will I use for which area? I can pick and choose from best of breed solutions but I have to do integration work. When they CONVERGE they force a choice. "I am going to place my eggs in this one basket". To buy into the forced choice there must be compelling benefit.
- Some interesting focal points came out of the conversation.
- What is software defined storage? General consensus is that the term has been overused by too many different architectural implementations.
- Is the new Storage array storage software that runs on X-86 servers? In general this ship has sailed. There are very few storage implementations that are not software based, (Equalogic and the LSI Engenio products sold to NetApp come to mind), and increasingly hardware assisted functions like RAID and deduplication are also being built into the software stack.
- Will ServerSANs prevail? This is a true combination of server and storage. There are many unanswered questions in this category. One common question was the impact of running the storage stack on the same processors as the server stack. How many fewer VMs can you host and what is the impact of that. A more pressing question might be, how will customers accept this new paradigm? Corporate IT is built around silos and people and process issues have to be broken down for the technology to find broad acceptance. Customers are still in wait and see mode here. They are risk averse and are not prone to putting all their eggs in that single basket.
- How will latency be handled effectively for scale out solutions. here there was discussion on if Infiniband would find broad acceptance in corporate datacenters as a storage interconnect outside of products such as Oracle Exadata.
You can track more of the ServerSan conversation using twitter with the hashtag #serversan or go and full the full content at https://www.crowdchat.net/serversan
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