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]]>However, some early flash SSDs implementations come with a set of limitations that customers need to be aware of, notably around usability and resilience. This note illustrates how the combination of technological advances and declining prices will open up new use cases for flash SSDs in the enterprise, while flagging some of the caveats that customers need to be aware of.
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]]>The post Will Storage Go the Way of The Server? appeared first on Gigaom.
]]>The long-term future of storage is about smart software that manages a large pool of cheap interchangeable hardware. However, in the near term, mainstream enterprise buyers continue to move cautiously while upgrading their existing installed base mostly with more of the same from vendors such as EMC and NetApp. But the current recession is making them more price-sensitive and creating pressure to try technology from newer vendors such as 3PAR and Data Domain for growing pockets of use cases. Cloud/online service providers are the most price-sensitive and open to new approaches since their storage capital and operating expenditures have a direct impact on their ability to offer competitive pricing.
Customers are transitioning from storage typically bought for a specific application to a more horizontal, virtual pool that better matches the shared resource model of their virtual servers. Much of the growth is occurring in two customer archetypes that are very different from the legacy enterprise data center characterized by scale-up architectures.
Scale up describes a model of using bigger, more expensive machines, whether for storage or servers, to get more performance. The scale-out model is when many smaller, inexpensive machines working together are used for better performance. Just about all enterprise software is written to scale up while cloud-based software is primarily written to scale out.
Storage technology is morphing in the direction of server technology, more slowly in the enterprise and faster in the cloud.
While these last two trends are very significant for the storage industry, we are treating them as outside the scope of this report, which deals with the commoditization of storage in the midst of a transition to virtualization and cloud computing.
Changing customer workloads and emerging technologies are driving changes in vendor business models.
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]]>The post VMware’s vSphere4 Announcement: A Critical Perspective appeared first on Gigaom.
]]>VMware has captured the marketing zeitgeist by labeling its suite “the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud.” Private clouds are, in fact, being adopted ahead of public clouds, and VMware is right that it will only be successful if it enables mainstream commercial workloads to be run in these clouds without requiring modifications to the applications. The company claims that “for hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures.” While VMware is by far the best-positioned vendor to enable these, and is building that stack from the bottom up, we would have liked to see more detail on what that top-to-bottom private cloud stack would look like.
As Gregory Smith of IT and telecommunications outsourcing firm T-Systems articulated at the April 2009 SAP Virtualization Week, a true private cloud provides infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to enable end-to-end application services delivery. While virtualization provides the crucial foundation for IaaS, VMware is still assembling the top layers of the IaaS stack – such as the ability to charge internal departments based on their usage of IT resources. Moreover, vSphere 4 maxes out at 32 physical servers in a single logical resource pool, which represents the scale of a medium-sized puddle, not the large pool required for an enterprise cloud. Clearly private clouds are still very immature today. VMware could have used that opportunity though to provide customers with more clarity on which workloads should be put into private clouds first and what the barriers are for more critical workloads.
The company did not emphasize its previous aspirations of managing end-to-end application services delivery. We expect VMware to ship an upgrade to its highly regarded AppSpeed application performance management product some time later in 2009. However, it will only provide application-level intelligence for a limited number of workloads, including J2EE frameworks, .NET, SQL Server and a few others. We believe VMware is leaving the application-level management to others because it did not want to compete head-on against Microsoft and the Big Four systems management vendors. Moreover, most customers prefer to have their existing systems management tools span across and provide an integrated, single view into both physical and virtual infrastructures.
The company did not talk about its desktop virtualization product line, renamed View. Since View is based on the newly refreshed server virtualization infrastructure, we would expect to see a refresh toward the end of the year. For users accessing a desktop environment streamed from servers, the increased storage efficiency will help bring capex costs down toward those of traditional desktop environments. Better presentation protocols, including the one coming from the joint work with Teradici, will bring Adobe Flash and other rich media support to end-users. What’s not clear yet is when the client-side bare metal hypervisor that works in occasionally-connected environments will finally ship. However, many of the fifty VMware customers and channel partners we interviewed did say that, given VMware’s advantage in managing servers, their customers expect to use that same infrastructure to manage their desktops, when and if they start that migration.
Overall, we are impressed by the product announcement, with which VMware will further expand its already considerable lead over Microsoft and Citrix. However, we suspect the company will face formidable challenges in transitioning its own sales force and particularly its channel partners toward a multi-disciplinary, solutions-led sale.
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