"There's this incorrect fear that in-band will impact performance," he says. "A lot of people have a misnomer [sic] about virtualization performance, because the early products weren't as mature."
Adds Barnett: "If we had taken our customers a Windows-based solution, they would have laughed at us." Presumably, then, that means customers did laugh at IBM, since the company previously resold the Windows virtualization software developed by DataCore Software Corp., a partnership that has fallen by the wayside at this point (see IBM Signs Sneaky DataCore Deal).
As far as customer adoption, though, the technology is still definitely in the "show-me" phase. To illustrate: IBM has shipped the SAN Volume Controller to nearly 60 locations where it can demonstrate the technology, whereas it has signed up only seven customer beta sites.
One beta customer, National City Corp., an Ohio financial holding company and lender, is using the SAN Volume Controller to improve the utilization of its 20 TBytes of storage that's split among about a half-dozen subsystems in several IBM Sharks and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Lightning arrays. Unfortunately, National City refused to comment on how it's testing the technology, citing a nondisclosure agreement with IBM.
Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch
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