Storage Interoperability: Fact vs. Fiction

1. Storage Interoperability:Fact vs. Fiction Steve Duplessie Founder/Sr. Analyst The Enterprise Storage Group, Inc.

2. Why Should You Care? • Interoperability • Promotes staff efficiencies • Cross pollination of talent

3. Why Should You Care? • Interoperability • Promotes scale • Only way to get to an automated, policy based storage infrastructure

4. Interoperability • Enables best practices in adherence with established business rules

5. Interoperability • Supports consolidation • Improves utilization rates • Enables long term planning

6. Why Should You Care? • Interoperability Is The Key To Client Choice • The 3 Areas Of Concern • Physical • Management • Usage

7. Interoperability Is The Key To Choice • The Bottom Line • It will never happen without STANDARDS • You may get some things, but never utopia until standards are derived and adhered too. • Purpose-built solutions are still OK

8. Standards Make The World Go Round • Interoperability Is The Key To Client Choice • STANDARDS: • Ethernet • Physical – Yes • Management – Yes (SNMP) • Usage – Yes (CIFS/NFS) • iSCSI? It will be!

9. Interoperability Is The Key To Client Choice • STANDARDS: • INFINIBAND (Next Year) • Physical – Yes • Management – Yes (but rudimentary) • Usage – Yes (Server Side)

10. Who Needs Em? • NON-STANDARDS: • FIBRE CHANNEL • Physical • Devices work • HBA’s work • Switches work • Just Not Together! • Different Code revs = BOOM! • Still No Inter-Switch Zoning

11. A Case Study In How Not To Go To Market • NON-STANDARDS: • FIBRE CHANNEL • Management • Device management only, no standards mean no universal frameworks. • All subsystem vendors use their own management techniques. • Virtualization is critical enabler here

12. The Only Thing That Matters • USAGE • Storage Array based applications don’t/won’t interoperate. • Until they do (they won’t), the only way to gain true interoperability is via Virtualization – external to the arrays. • Until we can do SRDF type functions from an EMC Symm to a Dell array, we have no real interoperability.

13. Virtualization IS the Key • Won’t be a standard for a long time, but will enable physical, management, and usage interoperability. • Get in the game – this play eliminates the wait time for other standards.

14. Pick A Virtualization Play And Start • VIRTUALIZATION • Will ultimately shake out as a hybrid – running components on the host, switches, and devices. • Will enable you to use existing assets in a cohesive storage infrastructure. • Enables true choices – anything to anything connectivity and usage.

15. Demand Standard Interfaces From Vendors • Interoperability Is The Key To Client Choice • Standards Belong On the Interface • Vendors should keep proprietary as their back end special sauce. Who cares how an Ethernet switch works, as long as it does?

16. Until We Reach Nirvana • Purpose Built Storage • Certain problems mean forget standards – if you find something specifically designed to solve a specific problem, use it.