Lightning, thunder and turbines: Oh my
Posted Thursday, February 09, 2012 in Alternative Solutions 0 comments
All of the talk of lightning, thunder and turbines this week has evoked a stark image of a jet plane hitting stormy weather. It’s an apt metaphor for what IT is facing with storage in virtualized environments. CIOs we speak with confirm that storage budgets have been hit with a force 5 hurricane due to the widespread adoption of server virtualization. One thing’s for sure: neither PCIe SSD cards nor SSD storage appliances will provide shelter for buffeted storage budgets.
EMC’s VFCache and the more established Fusion IO certainly can support more I/O, and that’s a good thing for virtual machine workloads. These approaches validate what we’ve been saying for a long time at Virsto: that getting closer to the source of the problem (virtualized workloads in the server) can yield superior results than overprovisioning hardware (solid state and otherwise) in an external disk array. Clearly, this is where storage architectures need to move.
One could deal with VM performance challenges only with specialized physical cards that install in the server, physical appliances stuffed with SSD to replace the array, or caching approaches that rely heavily on SSD. Nothing wrong with cool hardware, and at Virsto we’re huge fans of SSD. But data center architects have to be careful not to perpetuate a very nasty habit: throwing excessive hardware at problems to overcome weaknesses in software architecture. Over the years, we’ve gotten far too comfortable with overprovisioning storage arrays. Please, for the good of all humankind, let’s not do the same things with server-side storage, ok?
A more holistic approach already exists for IT to bring server and storage virtualization into equilibrium: It’s called a storage hypervisor.
We at Virsto happen to build what many think is the best one in the business.
Yeah, performance matters. But there’s more to it than only performance.
Yes, one of the fundamental challenges caused by server virtualization is highly random I/O, and yes, flash based SSDs can be good tools to solve one of the VM I/O problems. (Although, as people in the know will tell you, flash is not inherently very good at small block random writes, which is what server hypervisors tend to generate gobs of, especially in use cases like VDI.) However, a brute force approach to solving just the performance aspect of the VM I/O conundrum can be just another form of overprovisioning (that is, overspending on) storage hardware.
The Virsto approach to the broad set of VM I/O problems is holistic. Yes, we deal with performance issues. Just last week a customer in Europe bought our software because we made their hardware do I/O 44X faster. And no, that is not a typo. Adding software, the Virsto storage hypervisor, to this customer’s existing hardware made it go 44 times, or 4400 percent, faster. When we say we can relieve you of the burden of over-spending on storage hardware – on both the server and array ends of the cable – we really mean it.
We made their hardware do I/O 44X faster.
But there is more to the VM (and cloud) I/O problem than just random I/O performance. That’s why Virsto has a more holistic view.
There is also the issue of massively wasted terabytes. I hate to be the one to tell you (let alone your CFO), but perhaps 80% of the physical terabytes you buy for VM storage are not really needed. And let’s not forget the billions of dollars in operating expense wasted by slow and complex VM provisioning. I could go on. There are plenty of other VM I/O problems that SSD, whether server-side or array-side, aren’t built to fix.
About, oh, ten years ago, we all could have kept dealing with our server problems by throwing expensive and proprietary hardware at them. But some pretty clever folks in Palo Alto, Cambridge, Redmond, and around the globe came up with a better idea. It was called a server hypervisor, and the concept changed the world in a fundamental way.
Now comes a team of people in Sunnyvale and Melbourne who have spent a couple years building a fundamentally different and architecturally elegant way to deal with the totality of VM I/O problems: the Virsto storage hypervisor. It boosts performance, with or without SSD, sure. But there’s a whole lot more.
SSD alone will not solve all the fundamental challenge of storage in virtualized environments. The emergence of the storage hypervisor will bring the economics of storage back into line. Just in time for things to get truly cloudy and stormy.
Leave a Comment