This article is more than 1 year old

Federation promises to bring your storage under control

Joined up but separate

Panoramic view

Some observers therefore see storage federation as just a step on a journey.

“The pessimistic view is that storage federation is the buzzword that vendors use when they don’t have a virtual offering. There is probably some truth to that,” says Everett Dolgner, director of storage and replication product management at WAN specialist Silver Peak.

“Storage federation is having the single view into your universe – everything, not just block or file – and being able to move anything to anywhere. It takes a lot of intelligence to do that. But the user shouldn't need to know where something is. As soon as you have to tell them to switch from the S: drive to the U: drive, say, there's a problem – it should just be the user drive.”

How does this differ from the distributed file system or global namespace approach, which aggregates disparate storage resources by layering a single file system on top?

Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of Quantum's StorNext Solutions storage management group, says that once you have a global file system in place you can do a lot more on top of that.

But he warns: “Establishing and maintaining a large file system is difficult. It is hard to maintain the integrity that customers expect.”

He says this is why Quantum limits StorNext to supporting Quantum's own primary storage and tape libraries, plus the company's Amazon-based cloud storage service.

“StorNext is a file system, but it also provides integrated data management across multiple tiers, for example to establish policies and move data across tiers, yet with a single namespace regardless of the actual physical location of the data,” he says.

“StorNext allows people to find data really quickly and make sure it's on the right storage at the right time. It's constantly optimising cost versus performance, and in many cases that is automated. For example, if I open a video file that is not currently on high-performance storage, it will move it for me.”

If all that sounds a lot like the arguments in favour of federated storage, that shouldn't be a surprise: as mentioned earlier, both these technologies are trying to solve much the same set of problems.

So too are storage virtualisation pioneers such as DataCore and FalconStor. They offer to virtualise and pool pretty much any primary storage you can throw at them, before layering on top a variety of software-defined storage services such as data mobility, flash integration and de-duplication. These are software products designed to run on commodity hardware.

However, while DataCore and FalconStor have had success in midsize companies and as part of appliance-type systems – for example for data migration – it often seems as if they are not taken seriously by large enterprises.

Perhaps this is because they are simply too cheap to be appear on a big company's radar, suggests Dolgner. After all, when you are trying to add a management layer across £2m-worth of enterprise storage arrays, would you trust that to a £2,000 box?

This could well change in the future though, as hyper-convergence and other cost-reduction trends encourage more use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware, even in mission-critical applications.

Next page: Block buster

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like