EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), meanwhile, made virtualization moves of its own this week, announcing that it will work with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) to bring its storage management applications to Cisco's MDS 9000 switch platform. EMC also said its PowerPath software, which splits I/O workload among multiple servers and storage systems, will support volume management for multivendor storage systems (see EMC, Cisco Do the Deed and EMC Turns Up the Volume).
IBM, though, says its SAN Volume Controller provides enterprise-class features and performance that have so far been unavailable in the market. Each dual-node "storage engine" provides 4 Gbytes of cache and four 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel interfaces; IBM claims a pair of storage engines provides up to 1-Gbit/s throughput and 140,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS).
The system will support snapshot, remote copy, dual-pathing, automatic failover, and nondisruptive data migration functions, IBM says. It will also include support for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) storage management specification.
"When I look around in the industry, when I see what's out there to date... I think, based on the business results, we would all conclude they don't have enough functionality," Barrera says. Other vendors' virtualization systems "cut a lot of corners or delivered only part of what customers wanted."
Well. This is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, since the SAN Volume Controller will -- at least out of the gate -- support only FastT and Shark storage. Talk about delivering only part of what customers want! But Barrera emphasizes that the SAN Volume Controller will eventually support heterogeneous storage environments, although what that includes is yet to be determined.
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