This is excerpt was written by the network manager of a Fortune 500 company, from the book Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management, by Tom Clark and courtesy of Addison-Wesley.
Virtualization of data
I consider virtualization to be multifaceted. Where I am concerned the most
is the apparent lack of movement toward disk virtualization similar to EVA.
I want disks to be little square things we shove into a controller on the back
side, while the front-end interface allows me to:
- Group like (speed, size, technology) disks, add to pool.
- Ungroup disks, remove from pool.
- Leverage any RAID type LUNs drawn from the same large total pool
or smaller.
A land where disk data is moved about freely and performance requirements
are met by rapid data migration in the pool: This is current in some
controllers, and we need it in more of them.
In the future the file system should be assembled across different LUNs
with different cost and availability metrics and files are tagged/placed based
on their value, security, and retention policies. It's an HSM hybrid where
the storage and file system create an ecostructure together. Cheap old data
is retired, and each we'll need less online storage.
I think the term virtualization has had its day. I'd like to see birth and
death of a file and all the care and feeding that goes along with it through
its journey on the media. It's not just disk or LUN virtualization, its data
virtualization.
This is excerpt was written by the network manager of a Fortune 500 company, from the book Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management, by Tom Clark and courtesy of Addison-Wesley.
If you found this book excerpt helpful, purchase the book from the publisher.
