Valued Partner News March 2012
|
"Whether converging or separating, the only constant is change."
The virtualization market is evolving so fast it's nearly impossible to keep up with it all. As more players move into the market the technology of what virtualization will do for you continues to change. The next frontier seems to be what is being coined as "Virtualization Hyper-convergence," the merging of all layers of your computing environment into the virtualization stack.
Today you can already run your environment on commodity servers with high availability and flexibility but up until now you still needed to use shared SAN storage to be able to move virtual machines between physical servers for high availability.
In the next generation of virtualization technology, companies like VMware, Red Hat and Scale Computing envision using the storage within your commodity servers as the storage for your virtualized environment, but without giving up any of the scalability, availability or flexibility (that's a lot of "bility's"), with the goal of improving upon them while providing the benefit of a lower overall cost.
Using multiple technologies including synchronization, storage tiering, and features learned from the HPC (High Performance Computing) clustering world, combined with virtualization, you'll be able to define service levels for applications and virtual machines while eliminating the need for high availability storage in the back end. All of the data will be spread throughout a highly available cluster of virtualized machines.
This technology is limited today, only suitable for smaller environments as there are performance hurdles to overcome as the environment gets larger, but early versions of Virtualization Hyper-convergence are available today in products like VMware's Virtual Storage Appliance and Scale Computing's upcoming HC3 clusters. I could see other companies like Isilon and Nexenta (through the Illumos Open Solaris initiative) incorporating virtualization into their storage products in the future as well. The end game for Virtualization is to encapsulate everything into the Hypervisor. Storage seems like it will be incorporated over the next couple of years, as physical servers, applications and desktops have already become. What's will come after that though? I can only imagine the network layer incorporating your firewall, routers and network switching is not far behind. These technologies can already run on commodity servers, so why not? This is probably why Cisco has gotten into the server game in the last couple of years...
 Partners Data Systems specializes in data storage and backup for virtualized environments. Let us know how we can help you take advantage of virtualization technology for your organization.
~Your Partners at Partners Data Systems
P.S. Speaking of "convergence" this video from TED Talks on SixthSense Technology takes the convergence of our computing world and real world to a whole new level. Amazing that it was made over 2 years ago.
|
