Tin eraser to storage glue: Virtualisation's past, present and future

The tools becoming the building blocks

Imagine the array on that

A few years ago the Cisco Flexpod was heralded as the future of virtualisation networking, a solution whereby pre-configured networking hardware is tightly integrated into the data centre stack.

Now we’re imagining a deployment without any physical network hardware at all – it seems crazy to even contemplate, doesn’t it?

The very real future offered by VMware NSX (and alternative software-defined networking stacks like OpenFlow and CloudRouter) could make this a reality.

With nothing more required physically than a couple of cross-connects from your IP service provider’s border routers, and enough switch ports to join together all your hosts, we could be handling all other essential network services – switching, routing, firewalling, application delivery, load-balancing – from within the virtual cluster itself.

VMware has been quietly improving its software storage solution, the Virtual SAN.

Previously known as the Virtual Storage Appliance, it was initially something of a niche product – primarily aimed at those with little budget for a dedicated SAN – to enable administrators to leverage cheaper disks and sweat storage assets contained within host servers, while still offering high-availability features across the cluster.

What started off as little more than a distributed RAID array has grown into a mature product that can deliver elastic scalability to any storage system, from running a cluster entirely on a Virtual SAN to simply bolstering the capability of a dedicated storage appliance with a little short-term boost.

Citrix is another worth watching. It's at the opposite end of the size scale to VMware but is made more interesting by this year's acquisition of Sanbolic. That company claimed to unify management of heterogeneous storage through the company’s software-defined storage platform.

Sanbolic potentially lets you abstract different flavours of storage, from internal disks and simple JBODs to all-flash arrays and enterprise-class SANS, into a converged, scalable storage platform.

It brings with it enterprise-level SAN functionality, including RAID, snapshots, cloning, replication, QoS, even de-duplication, to whatever rag-tag band of storage misfits you want to cram together and call a hyper-converged storage system.

Sanbolic was originally designed for virtualisation, as most SDx products were, but it also transcends its original medium. If you want to run it behind your VMware cluster you can; you can even interface with a VMware virtual SAN as backend storage, or use the virtual SAN to manage Sanbolic if you prefer a single pane of VMware glass.

But Sanbolic can also deliver storage to the Xen, KVM and Hyper-V hypervisors, and even to non-virtual flavours of Windows and Linux.