Killing the storage array controller

Stealthy startup ZeRTO's CEO Ziv Kedem could have opened his technology kimono in a comment on a storage controller location story. The lengthy comment cited Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switch. It said: "When you are hypervisor resident, you can support things like VM vMotion and storage vMotion, without requiring any …

[Anonymous Coward]

Left Hand have been doing this for a while

Checkout left-hand networks(Now HP) P4000 Virtual SAN appliance.

Best feature for me is network-raid distributed storage. It supports VMWare-HA and DRS between remote sites.

Makes using more traditional DR approaches seem really painful.

[IO-IO]

enterprise is more than a spaceship in star trek..

that may be a cool sounding idea and for really, really small organisations that think data is dispensible it might be a good idea.

What differentiates an enterprise hardware solution from something cheap and cheerful is the integration and error checking of all underlying components. When good tech goes bad it is the ability to manage the error conditions with the underlying disk that allows you to preserve data and service delivery. Just ignoring the underlying hardware and managing everything from software puts this responsibility elsewhere and with jbod the resillience simply isn't there to begin with.

High-end disk isn't going to disappear anytime soon, and trendy software/virtual appliances aren't going to change that.

If your current disk is complex maybe it is time to find a newer more relevant vendor.

[Daniel B.]

You'll pry my RAID5 out of my cold, dead hands.

If enterprises only wanted to have JBODs, EMC and company wouldn't be in that business at all. JBOD means that if and when one of your HDDs goes down, everything will go to the shitter. All the RAID5 stuff means that you only need to swap out the damaged disk for a new one, and the whole thing will reconstruct itself.

These claims from a VM vendor look like someone proposing drivers to do away with seat belts. Bad advice!

[T J]

No Information, but intriguing

This article contains almost NO information and takes 3 pages to state a paragraphs worth of output. But Ok, its STILL interesting.

[Diskcrash]

High end brain death

This concept has been around since the start of storage and has had a number of various incarnations such as the former Sun Microsystems trying to convince people that all they need is ZFS for their storage.

So a couple of points come to mind right away. First, yes CPU cycles now days are way cheaper but they still aren't free so why do you want to tie up a core or more of your high end server to do what is effectively grunt work?

But secondly and most important what are you going to do if your server goes down or goes insane and decides fill in all the zeros with crayon? What an external storage system brings to the party is the ability to quickly and easily connect to multiple servers either directly or as part of a Storage Area Network. In a SAN you take a volume and move its ownership from one server to another with a few clicks of your mouse, a line or two of commands or as part of an automated script.

This is the basic reason why PCI based RAID controllers as great and fast as they can be are not recommended for every situation. You simply get a higher and better availability when you use an external storage solution.