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

The tools becoming the building blocks

And in conclusion ... embrace distribution

Once you start thinking about what could be achieved with converged, scalable storage that is platform independent, combined with other advances from software-defined networking and remote clustering, it becomes a field of mouth-watering possibilities.

These are, of course, cloud-source options. It must surely be a matter of time before the open-source community catches up to VMware and Citrix and starts creating its own spin on SDS.

I can imagine a storage framework that leverages the power of ZFS – and all the ludicrously high storage limits and low corruption rates it brings with it – combined with an open grid-like technology such as BOINC, the Berkeley Open infrastructure for Network Computing, which is most famous as the “citizen scientist” computational platform behind SETI@Home among others.

In this world the largest storage array might not be one device – it might not even be limited to one cabinet or even one data centre – it could be a distributed array of thousands of nodes, spread across every continent.

Gone are the days when to virtualise meant simply to consolidate. Visualisation has evolved, with people now talking of the software defined data centre.

If the vendors keep on and if the community does succeed in coming together, then as users we should gain in two ways: investments in physical kit and spend on power and operating costs should fall while the barriers on what is possible tumble. ®