Grid Meter » Storage Virtualization or Too Good to Be True?

April 11, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Storage Virtualization or Too Good to Be True?

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It's no secret that there are rigorous storage requirements for apps running on a Grid. As XenSource CTO Simon Crosby previously said:

"When you deal with a broader set of enterprise applications, you'll find that there are dependencies which are extremely difficult to resolve in terms of solving the allocation problem. For example, a particular app may need access to a particular dataset that lives on a particular SAN on a particular LUN, and you've got to deal with the storage virtualization world to solve that problem. The Grid's I've seen in action don't deal with complex storage architectures -- the data sets are local to the computation or are made available from a centralized server. But for a broader class of enterprise applications, the storage problem must be addressed. Many applications are now interlinked, for example a Web service today is composed of a Web server, an app server, and a database. And creating an instance of the service and placing it on the infrastructure requires the placement of all three running components."

As Crosswalk, Inc. officially launched the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System today, they described the Holy Grail for Grid storage demands (according to the release): "iGrid is a vendor agnostic grid technology that enables any application to access any authorized storage resource, any iGrid node to access any and all file systems, and all users to concurrently access any data they need for collaborative projects."

But as Chris Mellor pointed out in his write up this morning, Crosswalk's arm-waving does not provide any substantive technical details that would indicate whether this is real (as Mellor puts it, "There is no information on how existing storage products can be linked into iGrid, nor about how iGrid relates to other storage grid concepts, such as HP's smart cells or the GridFTP file transfer protocol. CrossWalk's iGrid information gruel leaves you asking for more").

Two or three years ago, if you recall, there was an onslaught of new systems management start-ups describing the future of "dynamic provisioning" in "scale-out, commodity environments." When reporters tried to dig a little deeper and test these vendors' stories, critical missing pieces tended to be immediately evident ... for example, many did not support Windows environments (no trivial absence for the majority of business users).

Crosswalk describes the finish line in their company launch press release, but I concur with Mellor that there's not nearly enough information about how they're going to take us there.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on April 11, 2006 08:21 AM

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