"The one thing we believe very strongly is we want other people's storage attached. The strategic statement is, any storage that customers tell us they need supported will be supported."
Barrera notes that the bulk of the development of LodeStone has taken place at IBM's development center in Hursley, U.K., that previously developed the proprietary Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk interface. "These are folks who know a lot about performance and availability," he says. [Ed. note: Although maybe SSA is not the best example to trot out, given that it's a dead technology?]
For now -- unlike EMC and HP -- IBM doesn't explicitly plan to develop its virtualization technologies for "intelligent" SAN switches, such as those from Cisco or Brocade, through its acquisition of Rhapsody Networks (see HP Opens Doors to CASA and Brocade Loads Code, Signs EMC).
"Conceptually, there are a good deal of similarities between the job that the SAN Volume Controller software does and the functions the switch guys are saying they'll do," says Barrera. "That said, we are still interested in the possible eventual deployment of our storage virtualization in a switch environment. We have ongoing conversations with all of [the intelligent switch vendors] but there's nothing to announce now."
Meanwhile, IBM is continuing to beta test the StorageTank SAN file system, which was originally expected to be delivered over a year ago. Barrera says that "getting a new file system up and running takes some time, and we want to get customer experience before we open the floodgates."
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