It's storage's Holy Grail: VSANs, PSANs and virtual silos

Three blog posts about VMware’s VSAN had me thinking furiously. Where is VMware going with this and where could or should it go? The first blog was Storagebod on VSANity in which he says VSAN, the ESXi hypervisor’s aggregating of server-direct attached storage (DAS) into a virtual SAN, was nice up to a point. He asks: “Why …

[lset]

I can see where you are coming from...

But haven't similar products to do what you are describing existed before? Doesn't Hitachi have their Unified Storage product (HUS VM)? It's just horribly expensive. Atlantis have something kind of similar, where is combines RAM and any backend storage (DAS, NAS, VSAN or PSAN) to produce an NFS share back to the hypervisor (and it gives absurd performance in some cases): http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/products/usx.

Also worth pointing out that one of the blogs asked why the limit on VSAN was 35 disks per node. From talking with the VMware guys, 35 disks is just what VSAN is certified for (it was originally only 8 disks and then 16 in the Beta), it's not an actual limit. Pretty sure VMware will turn around on a 1.1 or 1.2 release and have just certified a higher disk capacity. Plus I'm sure that limitation isn't a top priority for them at the moment, seeing as EMC already have ScaleIO which is hypvervisor agnostic and can grow to stupid sizes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Layers & Layers

I really do understand that a new abstraction layer is called for here. Where I have some reservations is around the need to play well with another's kit and at what point do we call for taking a sledgehammer to that stack of layers to reintroduce lost efficiencies. Forty- five years dealing with this vicious cycle so pardon the jaundiced eye.