Forget selfies. 'Server SAN' is storage world's 2014 TWERKNADO The Wikibon consultancy says a developing Server SAN form of storage needs to be tracked by IT people. The authors bring together the concepts of virtual SANs and converged server/storage hardware and software systems with a server SAN being a collection of servers whose direct-attached storage (DAS) is virtualised by software …
This deserves a new category beyond mere vapourware, Perhaps aspirationware or some such term. It's essentially a lost of idealised requirements, almost all of which have been around for years. Any number of attempts have been made at abstracted, virtualised storage models, and it's proved to be an extremely difficult nut to crack. Merely chucking into the mix a few bits of technology which may, or may not be appropriate does not make for a solution to the problem. At the heart of things is the extremely difficult issue of producing a generalised, robust configuration model which addresses the relationship between storage and application and how it's accessed. At the moment, there are multiple paradigms and levels of abstraction of entities from blocks up to objects, and it's not clear that there's any obvious single model.
When there is a product in the offing, then let us know. As it is, this is not much more than another hyped buzz-phrase,
Chris - thank you for sharing our research and continuing the conversation.
First of all, we would say that while VSAs (and derivatives of them) have a place in the market, they do not fit into our Server SAN definition. They don't meet the very-scalable architecture requirement, nor the performance (able to utilize flash) characteristics that we set forth for this space.
There are plenty of scalable storage platforms (EqualLogic, Isilon and others) that also don't fit into this category since this category includes compute as well as storage.
VSAs and other scalable architectures still have plenty of utility in the marketplace, they just don't fit in our new category. We appreciate all feedback and apologize if my choice of color didn't thrill.
I have not commented in a long time, but this is the biggest load of fucking bullshit I have read in any IT publication. Generally Chris's Storage articles are pretty good, not quite up to the former TPM's *Nix ones but not far off.
Please tell me you wrote this up for a giggle? Most of it doesn't even make any sense!
Try a more credible source source than this pointless outfit (wikipedia them...) next time, or don't post the story at all.
Or at least that is what it sounds like to me - consolidating a SAN and a VM host. Maybe this is a "new paradigm" for the virtualization hype types, but having read the article twice, the only thing that is "new" is that the disks are pre-configured (handy for those only up to the task of accessing them by clicking on pretty icons in the GUI).
Is this seriously intended to be seen as fundamentally different to running a Xen/KVM VM host full of disks, running FreeNAS in dom0?
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